The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Loverboy by Victoria Redel
Eckhard Gerdes

Victoria Redel. Loverboy. Graywolf Press, 2001. 208 pp. $21.95.

Loverboy, winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize, is poet Victoria Redel’s debut novel about a mother’s insatiable obsession with her young son, Paul. In concise, precise, often poetic prose, Redel propels this conflict inexorably toward its horrific climax, at which point all the complications come to a head and the mother confronts an ultimate opportunity for change. Loverboy is a tragedy in which the mother’s fatal flaw is her love for her son, and this love leads to her undoing. We should perhaps not be surprised if the structure of this tragedy follows such an Aristotelian model. Nevertheless, Redel gives us a well-crafted albeit rather traditional narrative. Through an interesting layering of flashbacks, Redel reveals the mother’s own neglected childhood, for which she overcompensates with her son, but it is certainly not any intricacy of narrative structure nor inventive violation of our expectations that intrigues the reader. Rather, Loverboy is a readerly text that reveals the author’s hand best in her use of diction and syntax. There are wonderfully poetic sentences dotting the bleak landscape of this novel: sentences with assonance, consonance, alliteration, and even internal rhyme—sentences that make the reader stop and pore with amazement over their construction; and all this is achieved without hindrance of the narrative. Although this novel is not very adventurous formally, it does take issue with the notion that literature somehow needs to concern itself with a midrange of human experience. Loverboy is a novel of extremes, and Redel is to be applauded for her relentlessness. Only in the final chapter does she seem to back off unnecessarily from the gruesome and emotionally powerful conclusion. Without the last chapter, the book would have been darker but stronger. As novel, Redel’s Loverboy is more conventional than novel. As storytelling, though, this is some very potent stuff. [Eckhard Gerdes ]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Loverboy by Victoria Redel Eckhard Gerdes Victoria Redel. Loverboy. Graywolf Press, 2001. 208 pp. $21.95. Loverboy, winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize, is poet Victoria Redel’s debut novel about a mother’s insatiable obsession with her young son, Paul. In concise, precise, often poetic prose, Redel propels this conflict inexorably toward its horrific climax, at which point all the complications come to a head and the mother confronts an ultimate opportunity for change. Loverboy is a tragedy in which the mother’s fatal flaw is her love for her son, and this love leads to her undoing. We should perhaps not be surprised if the structure of this tragedy follows such an Aristotelian model. Nevertheless, Redel gives us a well-crafted albeit rather traditional narrative. Through an interesting layering of flashbacks, Redel reveals the mother’s own neglected childhood, for which she overcompensates with her son, but it is certainly not any intricacy of narrative structure nor inventive violation of our expectations that intrigues the reader. Rather, Loverboy is a readerly text that reveals the author’s hand best in her use of diction and syntax. There are wonderfully poetic sentences dotting the bleak landscape of this novel: sentences with assonance, consonance, alliteration, and even internal rhyme—sentences that make the reader stop and pore with amazement over their construction; and all this is achieved without hindrance of the narrative. Although this novel is not very adventurous formally, it does take issue with the notion that literature somehow needs to concern itself with a midrange of human experience. Loverboy is a novel of extremes, and Redel is to be applauded for her relentlessness. Only in the final chapter does she seem to back off unnecessarily from the gruesome and emotionally powerful conclusion. Without the last chapter, the book would have been darker but stronger. As novel, Redel’s Loverboy is more conventional than novel. As storytelling, though, this is some very potent stuff. [Eckhard Gerdes ]

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