Snakebite Sonnet

A funny yet moving debut coming-of-age novel traces Nicholas Wertheim's thirty-year sexual obsession with an upper-class neighbor, ten years his senior, and his struggle to release himself from his youthful yearnings. A first novel. Tour.

At the outset of this poised first novel, Nicholas Wertheim, child of aging hippies in suburban New Jersey, sucks the incision he's made in 19-year-old Julia Turrel's snakebitten thigh. That the snake turns out not to be poisonous at all-and that this news comes from Craig, Julia's 38-year-old boyfriend-suggests both the intensity and the misadventures that will mark the relationship between Nicholas and Julia. As Nicholas matures, moving to the "bucolic vacuum" of Ithaca to study at Cornell, and then to Manhattan to work as an artist, he chronicles his erotic history. His liaisons somehow intimately involve Julia, whether she is physically present or not. Julia herself never loses her hold on him, even as her own multiple relationships-warped by her alcoholism and the aftershocks of a quasi-sexual complicity with her unstable father-complicate her essential bond with Nicholas. The writing-veering into lush descriptions of one erotic entanglement after another, ruefully evoking the optimism of young artists scrabbling for a foothold, or indulging the edgy romanticism of someone damaged by the vagaries of his beloved's affections-flirts with excess. But Phillips demonstrates a poet's ear for lyric precision and a comic's for surefire punch lines. Translation rights: Harold Ober; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Poet Phillips's first novel gives us the standard youngster- on-the-cusp routine and does a nice job of it, too. Unfortunately, however, the momentum builds up past the author's ability to rein it in, and the joyride eventually runs off the road. Nicholas Wertheim, our hero, begins his story at the age of ten. This isn't an arbitrary start: He first meets Julia Turrell then, and that can be said to be the start of all his troubles. Julia is almost a decade his elder, but Nick is precocious enough to fall in love at first sight, and his family is eccentric enough to make his precocity credible: His hippie parents have to be nagged into wearing clothes at home, for example, and Nick and his big sister Del learn how to make out by practicing on each other. Although Julia quickly goes back to Bennington and loses contact with Nick, the two find themselves reunited seven years on, when Nick starts college at Cornell--where Julia is a graduate student. This time his affections are requited, after a fashion: Julia is violent, drunken, unfaithful, temperamental, and as mad as the wind, often disappearing without warning for years at a clip in order to return in a more alluring and passionate guise. Nick is lost. ``Now, a story, as I understand it, is a matter of What Does Our Hero Do Next? The difficulty in telling the story of a cement- assed depressive like me is that our hero does nothing next, and does it over and over.'' Quite. When Julia is out of the picture, Nick mopes around, working at loser jobs, dating loser girlfriends. When Julia breezes back home, he drops everything and falls into bed with her. Eventually he breaks loose and settles down, but by the time he gets around to it, one feels more exhaustion than relief. Immensely likable but far too long (and long-winded): monomania rather than focus. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From his first glimpse of Julia, Nicholas Wertheim wants her, never mind that he is just ten years old to her 19. Sexy, rich, and self-centered, Julia is amused and intrigued by Nick and invites him to join her and her boyfriend for a walk in the woods. A frightening incident by a gravel pit provides the book's central image: love as a snakebite. Unhurt, Julia goes her own way, taking Nick's heart with her. Nick then begins an antic decades-long quest for love, marked by missed opportunities and thwarted passion, until he is forced to choose between his obsession and an independent life. His often raunchy adventures are charted through 13 chapters, the name of each being one line of the sonnet that comprises the 14th and final section of this clever, darkly comic tale. Phillips, known for his poetry and short stories, proves his skill at crafting longer fiction in his first novel. Recommended for public libraries.?Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This is an uncommonly well crafted first novel, from the intriguing chapter titles, taken from the lovely sonnet that closes the book, to the small graphic surprises scattered throughout. In clean, meticulous prose, poet Max Phillips tells the erotic coming-of-age story of Nicholas Wertheim. He's only 10 years old when he meets 19-year-old Julia May Turrell, but after attempting to perform first aid for a snakebite on her inner thigh, he remains transfixed by her for decades; in effect, he's the one who ends up "snakebit, and never dreaming of a cure." They meet up again when Nick attends Cornell, but after one night of blissful sex, Julia vanishes, reappearing at odd intervals for another intense bout in their never-ending psychodrama. Phillips is a beautiful writer, so that even when we grow impatient with Julia's erratic, alcoholic behavior, and Nick's tolerance of it, the novel reminds us yet again of the dizzying rush of first love and the allure of romantic desperation. Joanne Wilkinson