The Sex Offender - Softcover

Stadler, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802136958 ISBN 13: 9780802136954

Publisher: Grove Press, 2000

Synopsis

This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a teacher who has had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. While the man's crime was to mistake molestation for love, his cure will partake of the same confusion: to help and rehabilitate him, the police and the doctors subject the teacher to increasingly bizarre forms of therapy. Called "an astonishment" by Dennis Cooper, The Sex Offender weds compelling mystery with comedy, satire, and politics.

About this title

From the Publisher:

The controversial novel about an older man's infatuation with an adolescent boy, by the acclaimed author of Landscape: Memories and The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee.

From the Inside Flap:

This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a lapsed teacher who is guilty of having had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. While the man's crime was to mistake molestation for love, his cure will partake of the same confusion: in the name of love, the police and the doctors subject the teacher to increasingly bizarre forms of therapy. The Sex Offender is at once a burlesque of the State and an unmasking of the foundations on which our notions of love and psychological health are based. In lavish prose, it weds compelling mystery with comedy, satire, and politics.

"Equal parts Kafka, Burgess, and Brazil, Matthew Stadler's novel is beautifully morbid. The eloquent, florid prose in which Mr. Uh Uh describes his passions gives him an overwrought nobility.... Stadler's narrative weaves in and out of humor, grandiosity, fantasy, and sentiment with rare grace and cleverness."--The Village Voice

"A daring, controversial, necessary book."--Lynne Tillman

"Stadler writes with wit and precision, cleverly dramatizing the dialectical nature of social truths."--Publishers Weekly

Matthew Stadler is the author of Landscape: Memory, The Sex Offender, The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, and Allan Stein. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill fellowships and a Whiting Writer's Award. He is the literary editor of Nest magazine and senior writer for The Stranger.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0802136958
• ISBN 13: 9780802136954
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224