Regal House
Review by Walter Cummins
Peter Selgin’s Boy’s Guide is in many ways a deceptive novel. From its playful title and lively accounts of the adolescent hi-jinks of the Back Shop Boys as they outwit clueless adults, it might be considered a humorous tale of growing up. The narrator and central consciousness, Leopold Napoli IV, seems to be telling a story from a boy’s perspective of youthful challenges and frustrations. But that is only the amusing surface tale. Another story is being revealed within all that Leo is too young to grasp. An intense undercurrent emerges between the lines.
While outer space is one of Leo’s central obsessions through his dream of becoming an astronaut (“To touch something of the infinite. That was my dream”), the real subject is the inner space of a searching consciousness, a dimension as vast as the universe. The novel is filled with deaths and losses, though it is not grim, in part because Leo removes himself from their emotional impact until he is finally whole. Eventually, he comes to realize the true consequence of all that confronts him. How does a human being find a way to exist in such a world? What is there to save us?
Leo’s mind is a storehouse of arcane information that often spills from him when he finds himself in tense situations, as when he is being grilled by his school principal. Instead of answering, he states trivia like “The dot over the letter i is called a tittle.” But for all the facts that fill Leo’s head, he knows little about what really matters. That becomes the quest of his exploration into unknown realms. Circumstances launch him.
Leo’s nickname is Half, attributed to him because he has only half a middle finger due to a fireworks accident when he was six that is related to his early fascination with space. One rocket he lit to send up on a Fourth of July bursts into “a mélange of stars.” But another rocket explodes in his left hand, turning it into a “blob of ground meat.” Seeking to soar is dangerous. The nickname implies more than a deformed finger. Leo is a half-formed person with a long way to go.
Leo’s associations with others are complex. Despite the Back Shop friends, his inclination is to be a loner, detached from his sherry imbibing mother, rejecting his deluded hat store obsessed stepfather, Walter J. Waple, hostile to authority figures like teachers and policemen. His two closest connections are misfits of a different sense. One, his stepbrother Gordon, is mentally defective, with a vocabulary of only “a hot dog” that he pronounces as uhn haah dah. Gordon follows Leo like a shadow. The other, who calls himself Jack Thomas and lives in a hidden cabin, Fern Cottage, speaks with a thick German accent. Even though the Back Shop Boys regard who they call The Man in Blue with deep suspicions, Leo—with Gordon—visits Jack secretly and is taught to swim and play chess. Jack (really Johann) turns out to be one of the last escaped German World War II prisoners brought to America, wanted by the FBI. Leo becomes committed to protecting Jack. In teaching Leo to swim, Jack also teaches Leo of the significance of water.
Leo admits that he “had a morbid fear of water and drowning,” shivering every time he passed a lake or pond or river. He knows he must overcome his dread: “If I was ever to partake of something of the infinite, to conquer outer space, first I’d have to conquer my fear of inner space, meaning of water. Meaning I’d have to learn to swim. Meaning someone would have to teach me.” Once Leo becomes a competent swimmer and even loves water, Jack gives him another lesson that is central to the novel, linking the mysteries of water and space:
It struck me then that water and the universe had a lot in common. No matter how much we knew about them, they remained unfathomable. And since we’re made mostly of water, it stands to reason that human beings are just as unfathomable.
Jack summed it up neatly: “The deepest water you’ll ever drown in is yourself.” (Ze deebest woddah hyewl evah trown in iss yohzelv.)
Water, a torrent of it, becomes the apocalyptic force that brings Leo’s life and the world around him crashing down, the final blow to the dying hat factories of his community of Hattertown. Even before this calamitous Flood of `64, Gordon has drowned in the lake. Now the streets of the town are filled with water, Leo’s stepfather suffering a heart attack trying to save his stock of hats. When the rains have ended, “In the weeks following the flood, acting under the advice of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as a precautionary measure, the town selectman ordered all ten remaining hat factory chimneys imploded. Over as many days the sole remnants of Hattertown’s once glorious past, each rigged with a quarter ton of dynamite, were imploded.”
The novel is framed by brief opening and closing sections of Leo, now a man of seventy living with his wife in a trailer on Cape Canaveral, where he had worked for the space program after his time in the Air Force. The people of his youth are mostly gone, dead or lost to him, his aged mother in a home, Jack—The Man in Blue—vanished after deportation to Germany. As he walks Mr. Dog along the shore Leo encounters the debris of space junk, a mysterious object that NASA experts cannot identify and that he calls “Thing Unknown and Unknowable.”
Early in the novel, Leo, upset by the failure of his telescopic stargazing to reveal significance, craves answers: “How, I wondered, can something as vast, infinite, and mysterious as the universe leave me feeling so cold, so empty? There must be something more. There has to be!”
What “has to be” emerges for Leo on Earth in his realization that human connection is his answer, found in great part from his relationship with Jack Thomas and his need for Gordon, his acceptance of his mother and stepfather, and his later efforts to save the life of his son, also named Gordon, through a costly medical procedure paid for by the sale of a rare ancient book on swimming Jack had given him.
As he contemplates the Thing Known and Unknowable, he feels a sense of awe and wonder at “the thing that reminds us of how small and clueless we are, and at the same time how lucky to be alive in the presence of so great a mystery. Call it God, if you like.”
