As an overly loved child in a home in wartime Forest Hills, K. had only one consolation: the belief that one day he would become a great poet. Aside from his parents, the indifference and contempt of most of the children around him only reinforced his sense of destiny, for in Forest Hills poets were more likely to be scorned than to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Michael came to lead the paradigmatic poet’s life of wasteful time spent behind a drugstore counter, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and constant sexual scandal.
But he will never attain anything like greatness.
As recalled by K. in his magnificently humane factional autobiography, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. After a several years in a special school for promising children Katz ventured into the verge of the real world; but fearing that he would become lost, stayed too close to home.
A collection of friendships saves K's life from complete failure and barrenness. The novel brilliantly portrays the essence of friendship which early on K decides is his life's talent.
Later K’s self-thwarted ambition drives him onward–and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, Madam Lulu, a voodoo priestess recommended by his friend Father H; a shady entrepreneur selling worm farms, Clive Cliveson; and several susceptible, but interesting women.
His autobiographical faction demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive as an ember in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.
At the end he looks back and sees that his peculiar sexual obsessions prevented him from attaining his childhood dreams; and were nothing more than a diversion from the work required by reality.
Comment by mg
Poet's look forward. K's vision of the future is clouded by his persistent view of the gloomy past. K was educated in the Romantic poets. Despondency dispels poetic vision. mg
