Can Mr. von Abele be serious? Oh, yes. He appears to be attempting the Henry James manner in The Turn of the Screw. Unhappily, the passage reads like something out of Sax Rohmer. But then, the inadvertent comicality of such passages is only a minor flaw among a welter of major ones.

There is really little more to the story, though Mr. von Abele writes it all portentously. Andrew takes Anthony to Europe with him. And it is after this "desertion" that Emmeline burns all his letters to herletters he later asserts contained "the best of me." When he returns from Europe it is without Anthony. And after learning about the letter-burning, Andrew cries out to Emmeline, in dialogue reminiscent of Godey's Ladies Book for 1862, that he has made a great sacrifice for her. She naturally assumes he means the giving up of his affair with Anthony.

Not at all. As it emerges, we are to be confronted in the last few pages of this novel with an immense irony -such as close followers of the contemporary academic novel have been led to expect in late years. It seems that when in Europe with Anthony, Andrew met and fell in love with a young women, an art student. They

had an affair. A child resulted. It was this relationship Andrew sacrificed to return to Emmeline. Naturally, Emmeline is furiously jealous, in her dying moments, of the child (the mother has died). What is her true status, then? Saint, helpmeet, soul partner? None of these things. Merely a neglected wife, happy in this neglect so long as the husband's relations were the "depraved" ones of homosexuality, but miserable now that she knows he was capable of sexual relations with a woman and did not touch her because of her "saintliness."

An interesting story, yes, but flawed in the telling. Not because it is endlessly repetitive, not because events do not come in order, not because the sentences are elaborately convoluted, not even because the dialogue is stilted and old-fashioned. All of these things could be overlooked. What cannot be overlooked is that the book is dull to read. A bore. A chore. One thing is certain-to return to André Gide and to read the same story in his crystalline style is as gratifying as a cold shower on a hot summer afternoon.

-James Colton

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