Rose: A Novel

A child becomes the tragic victim of her mother's affair with a sea captain, and is forced to grow up in squalor and poverty in London

Surely we can read into the fact that the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud chooses to bestow on the eponymous narrator of her second novel (after Sexual Intercourse ) her own given name. Rose, 28, tells her life story--in a "book"that takes her two years to write--not as a chronological account but as journal-like reminiscences and impressions of events, interspersed with occasional comments on the current state of her affairs. She describes her unconventional early childhood on a freighter sailing between England, Denmark, Finland, Spain and Trinidad with her mother, her three siblings and Klaus, her mother's lover and the ship's captain. Rose initially mistakes Klaus's sexual advances toward her as a sign of his quasi-paternal affection, but not for long. The family, without Klaus, returns to England, where they live in poverty. As a young teenager in the early 1970s, Rose busies herself with barbituates and boys; her mother lacks the strength to tame her children. When Klaus reappears and again sexually abuses Rose, her mother accuses her of asking for it. The women in Rose's life are abused and abandoned by men--she describes her sense that they share "a female mystery, some kind of damage." Boyt's language is poetic; her descriptions through Rose's strong voice of sights, scents, people and moods are vivid, often painful but always lively .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An occasionally interesting but out-of-focus story about a girl-child named Rose (make what you will of the fact that the protagonist and author share a moniker), written by Sigmund Freud's great-granddaughter. Boyt's first novel was called Sexual Intercourse (1990); this one could be subtitled Sexual Abuse, since it chronicles the way Rose's stepfather molested her--and not even very secretly--throughout her childhood. Actually, though, it's the trappings of Rose's youth that are most compelling. Her earliest memories are of sailing from England to Denmark aboard her new daddy's boat; going eel fishing; making weekly visits to a bathhouse with her sister and brother to wash off the salt spray; enduring a storm at sea; and later settling down in Trinidad, where she watches her mother wrestle with a woman who's come on to stepfather Klaus. Rose is also witness and prisoner to her mother's fecundity (``I only have to look at a naked man to get pregnant''). Thus, every year Rose's mother produces another baby, with Rose soon giving her childhood over to infant care. But she is not fated to linger long at the sidelines of sex, since Klaus begins visiting her in bed. Craving approval and affection, the girl comes to appreciate his attention. Eventually, though, Klaus disappears, and the family spends many grim years in a tatty section of London, where Rose does downers and becomes a teenage tart. Interspersed throughout here are fleeting glimpses of Rose as an adult, experiencing murkily rendered problems with romance. But how the girl's youth informs her life remains a giant question mark. Unsatisfying as a sexual history, and in the end one wishes Boyt could imagine a novel that has to do with something besides sex--like character and plot for starters. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this bleak autobiographical novel, the protagonist, Rose, and her siblings accompany their hapless mother through her various misadventures with men. The story opens as the family join their mother's current lover, a handsome but abusive sea captain, on a ship in icy Denmark. They travel with him around Spain, South America, and the West Indies until they come to settle briefly in Trinidad. After their ship sinks, they return without the captain to a life of genteel poverty in the swinging London of the Sixties, where the now-teenaged children freely experiment with sex and drugs. Rose's mother continues to have lovers and babies until, at last, the sea captain makes a violent reappearance. The only remarkable thing about this choppy and cheerless novel is that its author is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. A marginal purchase.
- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, Ontario
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.