Disorder and Early Sorrow

...McDog is barking, and I am very excited...

...Patrick is outwardly friendly, but inwardly he is detached and anxious to keep from becoming involved with adult responsibilities: "The thought of it scares me because most people end up liking me much more than I like them, and all I can do is get up and leave and not be seen for a while and perhaps pretend not to see them if I pass them on the street...

...Only after Tike eavesdrops on a conversation between Val and her father, who are talking about him, can he begin to feel anger...

...The novella is simple enough in itself, almost a modern Sorrows of Young Werther, but Strong has given it an extra dimension by employing a leitmotif of musical and literary references...

...Strong is especially deft at sketching characters...

...Supperburger had apparently planned to jump off, but he drops the volume of Swinburne poems to the ground instead, and his wife pulls him back...

...Supperburger's dinner is being given to celebrate his wedding anniversary, the completion of his ninth symphony, the visit of his nephew Louis (who is about Patrick's age), and the bringing together of the two boys...

...This routine is broken as Tike becomes involved with six people who live in the same apartment building, has a brief affair with one, is rejected, and ends more alienated than before...

...This is the voice of Tike, a college dropout living on his own for the first time...

...The people you do get to know will mean a lot to you...

...Supperburger confronts them, obviously believing that Patrick is jeopardizing their marriage...

...Tike realizes that it would have been better for him to fall in love with her, but it is obvious that they are both attracted to Val's aggressive personality...

...Later, he accosts the composer on the street, and they become friends...

...When I say they are reminiscent of Mann or Gide, I do not mean they are imitative, since he certainly has his own style...

...If his subject matter is somewhat limited, he knows how to exploit its nuances, and there is no reason to believe that its scope will not broaden with time...

...Earlier, Mrs...

...Val seems meant to suggest, among other things, Valkyrie...

...The letter from Tike's mother is brilliant, and tells the reader all he needs to know about Tike's background: "Your last letter worried us...

...Val is the antithesis of Tike, and gives a contemptuous description of him: "You think out every step...

...His real name is Timon, and while he does not know Shakespeare's play, he loves solitude almost as much as the famous misanthrope...

...Reviewed by PHOEBE PETTINGELL "When i was twelve I felt things would be all right when I was sixteen...

...One is the deservedly famous "Supper-burger," the other is entitled "Quilty...

...When Tike asks Val why she decided to sleep with him, she answers, "I had to try you out...

...As she correctly deduces, Tike is not able to fight back...

...The narrator is an 18-year-old of Italian-Irish descent, Patrick Polo, a charming street urchin who befriends old ladies living on the "Hill...

...Strong's stories are compassionate and moving...

...You just have to be patient...

...Strong's habit of introducing a new direction at the end of a story is reminiscent of Andre Gide...

...his sadness never turns sentimental, and he never simplifies his characters' problems...

...in fact, he has been saying goodby to him...

...Rufus has translated Goethe's beautiful "Kenst du das Land" for his new girlfriend, a budding Leontine Price (incidentally, the translation is excellent...

...The dream suggests that Tike does not really believe he is Siegfried, but Gunther, who is unworthy to espouse Brunhilde...

...Having found her lost pearl, he muses, "It really doesn't mean anything...

...We know it is hard to find a place in a new town and to meet people...

...In Tike, it centers in the apartment building, a converted Victorian house, and is reflected by Mignon's memory of her childhood home in "Kenst du das Land...

...This foreshadows the displacement of the sensitive Tike by the zookeeper, who eventually wins Val...

...Above all, Strong has a delicate and sure touch...

...Tike is listening to the forest murmurs from Wagner's Siegfried, and later he makes love to Val while they listen to the final scene of that opera, where Siegfried awakens Brunhilde...

...At the beginning...

...Now I am not sure things will be all right...

...Some oyster made it in India, I suppose...

...This rejection is a transcendental and rather wistful one, however, based on the recognition that after his grandmother's death, the family will not be able to keep the land...

...The life of the building revolves around Val, a beautiful and selfish girl, who teaches high school German, and whose rich father is the landlord...

...Although his situation is contemporary (his allergies make him draft exempt), his predicament is traditional—alienation and the sorrows of love...

...and I wanted to let you know again how much faith we have in you...

...Everything continues as it was...

...It comes into my mind for certain...

...Her former boyfriend, Rufus, says of him, "That boy never gets mad," and her new conquest, a zookeeper, who has unwittingly supplanted Tike, tells him, "If I found my girl making out with you I'd tell you where to stick yourself, then I'd straighten her out...

...Tike and Supperburger love the sea, and several of the pieces in the book take place in autumn, an echo of Thomas Mann ("Supperburger" particularly seems to be "Non-Death in Non-Venice...

...Tike's sufferings come from his ability to empathize with everyone, and his consequent inability to turn aggression outward...

...Tike is the first novella of Jonathan Strong, whose prize-winning and much-reprinted story "Supper-burger" had already distinguished him as a talented writer and chronicler of the sufferings of the young...

...The story concerns the boy's ambivalences toward the family group, and his rejection of property and adult materialistic values...

...I consider his first book a most promising work, and wish him a great future...

...At the end of the evening, the party goes up on the roof to look at the stars...

...You do not grow up as early as I thought...

...After dinner, Supperburger takes Patrick upstairs and tells him obliquely about a brief homosexual adventure he had had many years before, alluded to in the second movement of his first symphony...

...The last paragraph suggests that Patrick and Louis will have the involvement Supperburger could not achieve (the ninth symphony is jointly dedicated to them), although, as in Tike, the ending is somewhat ambiguous...

...My heart is pounding...

...This ending is ambiguous, since it is not clear whether Tike will be better or worse off for having thrown the stone...

...Supperburger" employs many of the same themes and techniques as Tike (it is told in the first person by a young boy, and uses leitmotifs), but is very different from the novella...

...Supperburger and Patrick had read lines from "The Triumph of Time" by Swinburne (Supperburger's favorite poet): I will say no word that a man might say Whose whole life's love goes down in a day...

...And he leaves it in one of the lilies in the garden for someone else to find...

...The Victorian town houses and the gentility of the old families on the Hill in "Supperburger" attract the rootless Patrick...

...You worry how you are feeling and how everyone else feels...

...Other symbols are more ambiguous...

...The past in Strong's work is a symbol of a better and more stable time...

...There is a suggestion that he has become more misanthropic than before...

...But the composer is not making a pass at the boy...

...In the last sentences of the book, he takes action: "Suddenly I want to do something that will confuse everyone...

...For this could never have been, and never-Though the gods and the years relent—shall be...

...Gramma would remember Grandfather Quilty as well without it...

...For one thing, the narrator believes he is telling his own story, though he is in fact telling that of the Boston composer Arthur Supperburger, at whose house he is having dinner...

...You're not a very outgoing person, but that can be good in the long run...

...It describes a large Fourth of July family gathering at the estate of Grandmother Quality in southern Illinois, once the territory (as a former resident of Illinois such as myself or Strong knows) of the great Indian chief Black Hawk, who fought bravely to regain his tribe's land...

...I step back and throw the stone at the bedroom window and hit it, and it smashes and glass shatters and falls down the side of the house making noise, and Val or Wendy screams from her bed...

...Supperburger is tormented by his compositions, which are not original, and by his inability to have the genius or love he really wants...

...He wishes the estate still belonged to the tribe, preferring cult over kin ties...

...The newer work describes in Tike's own words, and in the present tense, some three days in his solitary life, which consists of a night job shelving books in a library, listening to classical records, reading, playing with McDog, his one companion, walking on the beach, and receiving letters from his family and his best friend (now a college track star...

...Rather, although he writes about modern youth, he does so in a European tradition...

...He tells the party that there is another secret reason for the dinner, and although Patrick never learns what it is, the reader is gradually given the clues...

...And in "Quilty," the romantic saga of the Black Hawk rebellion, as found in Governor Thomas Ford's History of Illinois (1854), provides the feeling...

...He has tea with them and attends Friday afternoon concerts, where he once hears Supperburger's first symphony...

...She describes herself as "without innocence...

...Your parents must be very nice people who never gave you any trouble...

...When I was sixteen I felt things would be all right when I was twenty-one...

...Strong's book also includes five stories, two of which are up to the high standard set by Tike...

...Quilty," the other effective story, is again narrated by a boy, a sort of younger Tike...

...The pathos of Tike and his parents each trying to protect the other from their mutual guilts and anxieties is both funny and moving...

...These leitmotifs culminate in a dream that Tike has on his one-night stand with Val, in which the characters and events of the day take on the dimensions of myth...

...Val's favorite opera is Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, and she asks Tike to imagine that she is Ariadne and he the god Bacchus, come to comfort her for Theseus' betrayal...

...both Tike's mother and Mrs...

...Nostalgia for the past runs through Strong's stories in many forms...

...Supperburger express their relief at not being part of today's generation —and yet they seem as unhappy as the young people...

...Val's roommate, Wendy, has similar problems: She has also been rejected in an affair, and she is incapable of protecting herself against Val's bitchiness...