Author
:
Jubal Harshaw (
jubal@flash.net
)
Homepage of Author: potentially
http://www.flash.net/files/Authors/j/wwwubal
, but nothing there yet.
Date: August 1997
Size: 258K, 13 chapters, 46,000 words, 90 pages
Code : m/f teen rom
Author Information:
Jubal Harshaw is the name of a cynical writer in Robert Heinlein's classic SF satire A Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). As far as I know, his namesake's only story so far has been Passages of Life.
Celestial Review:
From Celestial Reviews 210 - August 23, 1997
"Passages in Life" by Jubal
Harshaw (jubal@flash.net). Guest review by Green
Onions.
Ah . . . the joys of church summer camp.
Fresh air, tall trees, silly skits,
roasted marshmallows, clear spring water, and - um - the other
stuff.
No, I don't mean sneaking out at midnight
and managing to put all the camp
superintendent's furniture out on rowboats tied to the pier or
any of the
other clever stunts that bored kids do in order to while away
the first time
in their conscious lifetimes in which they must somehow survive
bereft of the
blandishments of computer games, the vidiot box, and the local
cruising
strip. (Well to be frank: this is a.s.s. - not a 'Leave it to
Beaver' rerun on
cable TV - so you can bet that the "other stuff" I was
talking about is the
forbidden fruit normally denied to kids young enough to be denizens
of these
would-be gardens of Eden.)
But <ah-hem> this is not a child
porno story <amen!>; in fact the protagonist
is an almost unbelievably mature seventeen year old boy whose
brilliantly
planned and skillfully executed pranks of several years ago have
since become
legendary at the camp. His lover is another counselor who happens
to be
scarcely nineteen herself and the job they both have ahead of
them is to make
their relationship fully functional.
Well, what is there to a boy's 'first
time' anyway? Is it a gradual process,
one that begins with a lot of groping, giggling, cuddling and
caressing and
that eventually ends all-too-quickly in a juicy sticky splattered
mess?
Actually our hero's baptism is a long drawn-out affair, one that
the author
studies reverently in a remarkable number of sensual and psychological
dimensions through the mind of an unusually reflective protagonist.
This is
anything but a story of a 'quick fuck.'
Indeed this piece isn't principally about
sex at all, even though there's no
shortage of hot scenes. It has much more to do with romance and
the recovery
process from a short lifetime of failed youthful expectations
- AKA: 'growing
up.' As the plot develops, we discover that he and his lover have
met before;
both have an intricately developed past that turns out to account
in large
measure for mysterious ways in which they move.
What does it mean to cross the sacred
threshold between childhood and
adulthood in the context of romantic relationships? What does
it mean to have
a love affair based on more than superficial attraction or hot
passing
passion? How does a sensible person (or to be more precise, two
sensible
people) deal with the molting of their adolescent fantasies and
the emergence
of integrated romantic, sensual, and spiritual desire? And how
will our hero
step out of the shoes of a boy in order to don the vestments of
His Lover's
Man?
This is not a story for the impatient
or intellectually feckless reader: at
something in the neighborhood of 35,000+ words, it almost qualifies
for the
label 'short novel.' Most of the time I found myself enjoying
the author's
slow, painstaking and loving style of careful psychological development
- but
at other moments I occasionally wondered which of the myriad details
presented in the first few chapters would turn out to be important.
Granted: a certain amount of seemingly
'irrelevant' information is desirable
in any story to paint the scenes in the reader's mind, to frame
the events,
and to develop the characters. And one so often hears from the
literati
that a typical weakness of erotica inheres in the inability or
unwillingness
of so many writers to weave their protagonists' actions into the
subtle
complex tapestry of human needs, desires and motivations - a criticism
that
certainly hits the bulls' eye for all too many a.s.s. submissions.
Yet although the author's gift for careful
description tended to make the
story a bit slow at the beginning (for example, we learn the names
of nearly
a dozen different subdivisions of the camp in one of the early
chapters: none
of which is used later), it turned out to be a solid foundation
on which to
base the unfolding of the plot - the basic outlines of which are
probably
familiar to nearly everyone who has legitimate access to this
newsgroup.
Overall this is an extremely thoughtful,
well written and remarkably
sophisticated piece that might have been even better if the writer
had kept
in mind that in art, less can sometimes be more. It's also one
of the
sweetest emerging sexuality/emerging romance stories I've had
the pleasure of
reading and one that I think most patient straight or bisexual
readers will
find both charming and delightful.
P.S.: My humble apologies to both Celeste
and the author for the inexcusable
tardiness of this review. Perhaps a one-part repost of this excellent
novella
might be in order.
Ratings for "Passages in Life"
Venus (plot & character): 10
Athena (technical quality): 10
Flagger (appeal to reviewer): 10
Other Celestial Awards:
#7 on Celeste's Top 20 Stories for August 1997
Reader comments:
None found.
My Comments:
Summer camps have always been a popular subject for authors of erotica (and movie producers: remember all those 80's Meatballs variants?). I suppose this is because of the subject matter: lots of adolescents living in close physical proximity, and a comparative absence of adults to stop them from, ahem, associating ;-) The definitive story of this type is undoubtably Netwanderer's Girl Scout Camp. Of course the reality of such camps is very different from these stories.
In this impressive debut story, the author takes a different approach. Our hero is not a happy camper, but a reluctant counselor at a "religious" camp run by his cousin's church. It is here he meets a female counselor called Melissa, and, well, you'll see what happens. The story doesn't stop there, however; this meeting becomes the basis for a psychological exploration of the narrator's maturation. Celeste's reviewer describes him as "almost unbelievably mature" for a seventeen year old, but I don't agree with this description at all. I am aware of the popular perception of teenagers (especially among older members of the community) as surly baseball-capped delinquents who hang around shopping malls, but this is a misrepresentation. I suspect many people would be surprised by the quality of writing which comes out of Year 12 English classes; many pieces endeavour to explore the same concepts as Passages of Life, with comparable thoughtfulness and maturity.
The basic question Passages of Life asks is whether the initial attraction of the protagonists can be transformed into something more, and this question is intimately bound up with the fact of their youth. A substantial part of the story takes place after the camp, and this gives the author an excellent opportunity to further develop his character portraits through the narrator's relationships with his friends; this is done to perfection in the "party scene" and its aftermath.
I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent story; it is thoughtful, amusing and moving.
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