The Man without a Face

The Man without a Face, by Isabelle Holland (Lippincott, 158 pp., $4.95). Charles Norstadt is another of the lonely adolescents of our fiction, joining Holden Caulfield, F. Jasmine Adams and their coevals. Taken together, these teen-aged protagonists show us that growing up is a matter of metamorphosis rather than of evolution, that adolescence is a distinct state of being and as different from adulthood as caterpillar from butterfly. Charles, in fact, even thinks of himself as in a golden cocoon at one point. A product of the contemporary affluent middle class, this fourteen-year old has endured five school psychologists, three stepfathers, sibling rivalry, pot and permissive education. When Justin McLeod, whose scarred face makes him the faceless man of the title, reluctantly agrees to tutor Charles, the boy encounters for the first time the discipline that engenders self-discipline. Justin’s lesson to Charles is that we cannot be free of the consequences of what we do, and he begins to merge for Charles with another faceless man, the father he cannot remember. Miss Holland’s material approaches sentimentality at times, but Charles’ voice narrating his growing self-knowledge and metamorphosis saves these themes from bathos. j. m. janssen