Joseph and His Mother

...Deeper than Joseph's lust for his mother, the deepest ingredient of his Oedipus complex, is his desire to be a babe at her breast...

...Friedman produces the authentic child's world in which all adults are engaged in a conspiracy against the child, and no adult ever hears anything a child has to say...

...The anti-Semite is not just an ogrish father figure out of Stern's Oedipal fantasies, he also embodies a problem in the real world, and thus Stern's comic paranoia has a kind of social validation...

...However, as a failure A Mother's Kisses includes more incidental successes than many of our novelists manage in a lifetime...

...This leaves Joseph with a considerable weight of guilt, and it is thoroughly in character that when in the course of the novel he finds his sister and her fiancé going at it premaritally on the living room rug, he begs her not to tell their mother...

...It turns out to be a fuller look at the monstrous mother...

...We can hope that his next novel will have more structure, more economy, and more relevance...

...On this superficial level, most of Joseph's misery seems to be that he is a sexually-frustrated virgin...

...When she finally packs to leave him at Kansas Land Grant, it represents the withdrawal of the nourishing breast: Joseph sees her "stuffing clothes into her valise with great-breasted vigor...

...Now that second novel, A Mother's Kisses (Simon and Schuster, 286 pp., $4.95), is published...

...Meg keeps giving Joseph wet ear kisses, or mouth kisses that are "wide, and gurgling, and had some suck to them...

...When Meg tells him that he has finally been admitted to a college, Joseph cries on her bosom...

...When he dreams of abducting the camp director's wife, it is "to make a dash with her across the lake to safety at his mother's place...

...The humor is always tinged with melancholy...

...Friedman's imagination is garish and violent: Meg says in praise of a man, "I'd like to have a quarter for every guy he's had thrown into lime pits...

...Meg has a beautiful middle-aged Irish friend, and Meg keeps offering the friend, obviously as a surrogate, to Joseph: opening the woman's robe to show Joseph her fine legs and firm breasts...

...For years Joseph has taken advantage of the fact that neither he nor his sister Claire has a proper bedroom in their tiny apartment, by staying up until his sister comes home, then pretending to be asleep in order to watch her undress...

...Stern, was published in 1962, I welcomed it in these pages (October 1, 1962) with whoops of enthusiasm...

...In addition, A Mother's Kisses goes on too long (it is 286 pages, where Stern is 191...

...Where A Mother's Kisses fails, in comparison with Stern, is in total organization and in relevance...

...Joseph's image of the afterlife, interestingly, is "a high, shelflike place...

...I am afraid that as a novel it is a failure, that it is less effective than the stories from which it derives...

...At Kansas Land Grant, she invades his first class to bring him a sweater...

...a band of hoodlums get their kicks by "gang-tubbing" girls, stripping and scrubbing them...

...The book everywhere testifies to Friedman's extraordinary talents, and much of it is funny, moving and wonderful in the fashion of Stern...

...Joseph's fears of violence being done his mother clearly image his own wishes: he fears that the camp director will wrestle her to the ground, "getting her in a hairy-legged scissors grip," or that some tough will knock her down and she will fall so as to expose herself (the Fall in Stern...

...As this suggests, Joseph usually seems much younger than 17...

...Joseph's desperation about getting into college is trivial, and if his cutting the silver cord is the novel's plot, that plot never comes off...

...Better than some, worse than others...

...His dates are mostly breast play, the height of his ambition with the Irish woman is to lick her nipple, he is obsessed with his sister's "globelike appendages...

...Joseph finally admitted to Kansas Land Grant Agricultural, settling in there with his mother around his neck...

...Some touches in A Mother's Kisses are painfully realistic, such as the cringe of reminiscent embarrassment that Meg produces when she talks in rhetorical questions and mock negatives, or comments on people in their hearing, or demands special treatment for Joseph in restaurants, or insists that he "have a good time" whenever they go out together, or yells out the window to friends down on the street...

...Many of the bizarre details are similarly undirected and pointless...

...He is a great sniffer of his mother's sweaters and his older sister's pajamas...

...Since most of the stories were written before Stern, the test, as always, would be Friedman's second novel, and with many others I awaited it eagerly...

...It contains two excellent stories, "The Trip" and "The Good Time," both about a young man and his monstrous mother, but the rest of the stories range from disappointing to godawful, and it did not seem to warrant the space...

...Stern sets a terribly high standard for a writer...

...All this too substitutes for the mother, and the most accurate name for the novel would be A Mother's Titties...

...Stern has a real plot, which begins in the first pages when the anti-Semite molests Stern's wife, and ends in the final pages when Stern fights him...

...The center of Joseph's emotional life is his mother Meg, a savage caricature of a dominating mother...

...The book divides into four sections: Joseph suffering at home in Bensonhurst because he has not been admitted to a college, then mistreated as a camper waiter at Camp Fleetwind...

...Joseph back in Bensonhurst, still in quest of a college...

...We hear her tell Joseph, casually, that he was an unsuccessful abortion, and that he nursed on her blood...

...At the same time, everyone has an odd streak of reasonableness...

...The college material is the funniest part of the book, but by the time Friedman gets to it the reader is all scraped raw from too many previous keelhaulings...

...Joseph emancipated from the camp, living across the lake in a cottage with his mother...

...Along with this sort of realism, there is the wildest fantasy and exaggeration...

...She gives him every other kind of sex...

...At the height of his battle with the camp director, Joseph breaks the tense silence by asking him what sort of season he has been having, and the director answers automatically, "So-so...

...in fact, the novel's last section is an expansion of "The Trip...

...when he finally does quarrel with her and she agrees to go home, he wakes the next morning to find that she has been up since dawn ironing his linen, and would not think of leaving...

...When a student named Boils reveals on p. 250 that he can shoot his boils for considerable distances, we could not care less...

...Meg says that money means nothing to her, but she keeps her bills "crumpled up in sorrowful little black change purses...

...Deeper than the mother's domination is the son's mother-fixation...

...A Mother's Kisses has none of this, and it suggests that Stern was a lucky hit...

...Her favorite form of dancing consists in standing in one place and "shaking her chest, as though her breasts were on a shelf, the idea being to shake them down and win a prize...

...proposing, when Joseph is sick in bed and the Irish woman brings him some broth: "I think if you slipped in next to him, and gave him your chest, he could forget all about the soup...

...She says to Joseph, "just because I can't give you sex," but all she means is intercourse...

...Sometimes the disguises slip away...

...Joseph has a model Oedipal attachment to his mother, which assumes a variety of disguises in the novel...

...Meg has "mammoth breasts," and she is as preoccupied with them as Joseph is...

...Meg is a superb comic portrait, but a comic portrait is not a novel...

...Meg steals salt shakers in restaurants, and says to the headwaiter: "If you open your mouth, I'll bang you on the head...

...Meg is truly a horror...

...On the surface...

...Kansas similarly is a place where people address each other in hog calls, where even the fruit salad is served in patties, and where all the courses are agricultural except English, which deals exclusively with pastoral poetry, and is taught in the home economics kitchen...

...Friedman does not seem to have his great imaginative gifts firmly under control—but they are great imaginative gifts nevertheless...

...Joseph has (like his creator) a mammary obsession...

...There is a strong erotic feeling between Joseph and his sister...

...If Stern's mother is descriptive, and the mother in the two stories is comparative, Joseph's mother is superlative...

...A medical sequence, when Joseph hurts his arm, moves from the camp doctor, terrified of touching the arm, to the family doctor, who sneaks his surgeon brother into the kitchen to prepare his instruments for an amputation, to a $50a-visit specialist, so lordly that his office is an ordinary living room, who looks at the arm briefly and prescribes: "I'd leave 'er alone...

...In Bensonhurst, she embarrasses Joseph by wearing a bathrobe on the street, and once, at a basketball game in Madison Square Garden, he looked up and saw her "flying through the balcony in a bathrobe...

...A Mother's Kisses is the record of the misadventures of a 17-year-old boy named Joseph (he is never given a last name, as Stern is never given a first name) during the summer before he goes away to college and during his first weeks in college...

...There is much too much of Meg, but when she is dropped for a while and a character named Gatesy with new speech mannerisms is introduced, one wishes Meg back...

...Friedman writes in a beautiful sentence: "He had a hanging, half-awake shred of a memory involving cold, wet, milky, low and lassoing half-mad kisses in the darkness...

...When Friedman's book of short stories, Far from the City of Class, appeared last year (significantly not published by his regular publishers, Simon and Schuster), I decided not to review it...

...The wild verbal play generally masks anxiety, as in the pages Joseph spends characterizing colleges by the suggestions in their names: "the friendly, outgoing letterhead of Nevada Southern, the prim ascetic seal of Claremont Men's...