Books in Brief: Ourselves

Ourselves, by Jonathan Strong, (Little, Brown, 228 pp., $5.95).

A youth novel written by a very young man. (From his picture he might belong to one of our more respectable rock groups. Actually he teaches at Tufts.) The characters grow their hair, shop the Goodwill for easy chairs and huddle on them reading Torrents of Spring but somehow they manage todoitin the prose style of Somerset Maugham. The narrator, Xaiver Fereira, a Harvard graduate who is usually unemployed, recounts with a very low-keyed anguish the activities of his roommate and his roommate’s girl. Xaiver loves the girl and hates himself which accounts for the anguish, but nothing very dramatic comes of it. Although the novel is competently written with an interesting seesaw ending (the stable roommate grows unstable, the unstable narrator—you know), it’s thin and not very memorable. Still, a young man could do worse than to look to Somerset Maugham. And incredible as it may sound, there is not one—I swear to you, not one—pot-smoking scene. But most important, after reading the current crop of tastelessly explicit youth things, it’s nice to come on a passage like: “Susannah [the roommate’s bride] came over to me, smiled the most mysterious of her smiles, and threw her white laced arms around me, saying, ‘Oh, Xavy, sweet old Xavy!’ How can I put this delicately? I responded, well, physiologically to her embrace.”

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Ourselves, by Jonathan Strong, (Little, Brown, 228 pp., $5.95).

A youth novel written by a very young man. (From his picture he might belong to one of our more respectable rock groups. Actually he teaches at Tufts.) The characters grow their hair, shop the Goodwill for easy chairs and huddle on them reading Torrents of Spring but somehow they manage todoitin the prose style of Somerset Maugham. The narrator, Xaiver Fereira, a Harvard graduate who is usually unemployed, recounts with a very low-keyed anguish the activities of his roommate and his roommate’s girl. Xaiver loves the girl and hates himself which accounts for the anguish, but nothing very dramatic comes of it. Although the novel is competently written with an interesting seesaw ending (the stable roommate grows unstable, the unstable narrator—you know), it’s thin and not very memorable. Still, a young man could do worse than to look to Somerset Maugham. And incredible as it may sound, there is not one—I swear to you, not one—pot-smoking scene. But most important, after reading the current crop of tastelessly explicit youth things, it’s nice to come on a passage like: “Susannah [the roommate’s bride] came over to me, smiled the most mysterious of her smiles, and threw her white laced arms around me, saying, ‘Oh, Xavy, sweet old Xavy!’ How can I put this delicately? I responded, well, physiologically to her embrace.”