That's the name of a horse I've been following over the winter meet, and winning a few bucks on. But it also is an appropriate title for this review of Childhood by Andre Alexis, a Canadian author from Trinidad, who lapses into French dialog at many points in this tale of Thomas MacMillan who recalls growing up not knowing who his father is.
Just to be sure that my computer has not been possessed by rogue viruses that have corrupted my thesaurus, making picaresque mean anything but humorous, raucous, racy misdemeanors, I checked book reviews on the Net this morning. Nope, Amazon's top reprise calls this effort picaresque. Am I back in school miserably flunking a graduate course on the picaresque novel because I missed the first lecture and don't have a handle on its standard definition? Or am I, myself, on a quest -- incomprehensible, futile and insatiable -- to find a dozen or so novels that both entertain and mildly scandalize me?
If I had picked "stories about growing up" as the theme for 2010, Alexis employs several literary gimmicks to liven up his novel and most subtly advance themes of coming to terms with never quite understanding one's parents, nor for that matter, wanting to look too deeply into their personal/sexual lives, and of, nonetheless, becoming indelibly imprinted by the characteristics of those adults, so much so, they are apparent only to an observer who knows all the generation's traits and preferences. Alexis gives us enough of Thomas' personality to see the vestiges of his mother Katarina and her mentor Henry living on, if not genetically, than through strong behavioral modeling.
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