The Sex Offender: A Novel

by Matthew Stadler

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.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, American, Collections

206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

writer

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a man - a lapsed teacher who is guilty of having had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. Subjected to a battery of strange therapies (many of them actual practices in health institutions across America), the man struggles to understand and embrace the lessons being offered to him by the Criminal and Health Ministry in charge of his new life. Under orders of the Doctor-General Nicholas Nicholas, he is to find a new career away from the schools. He will become a writer; an occupation deemed therapeutic by the ministry's professional staff. '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, wedding mystery with comedy, satire and politics." From the flyleaf on the jacket of the original 1994 hardback edition of the novel from HarperCollins Publishers.

I have quoted the above because it includes the line "...(it) 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..."all the synopsis' on GR have removed that line and subsituted:

'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.'

and

'The author of Memory presents a provocative look at the nature of love in the study of a man found guilty of having a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy and the confusions and complexities of the cure for child molestation.'

The problem is that 'The Sex Offender' is no more about paedophiles or how to cure paedophiles then Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' is serious examination of means for curing poverty. Indeed 'The Sex Offender' is no more about sex offenders then 'Gulliver's Travels' is a children's book. The problem is that almost nobody today knows what satire is and fewer know what 'Swiftian' satire is even if it is staring them in the face. Wikipedia recognises that 'The book is strongly influenced by the theory of Michel Foucault on the links between state control of sex, health, and criminal behavior' but copes out on explaining what that means with a [citation needed] and goes on to talk about the rehabilitation of a sex offender by aversion therapy. You would never guess from GR or the reviews posted there, though it does get a mention in Wikipedia, that the novel has nothing to do with paedophilia or sex offenders.

So what is it about, let us go back to Foucault:

'Foucault's theory posits that state power operates not through direct repression, but by subtly controlling and shaping behaviors through knowledge and discourse in areas like sex, health, and crime. He argues that these domains become objects of scientific study and state intervention, which simultaneously offers knowledge and exerts domination. This process, Foucault argues, is not about suppressing these aspects of life but about regulating and shaping them.'

That is where the satire comes in because this a novel about power and control, paedophilia is the McGuffin of this story (if you have no idea what I mean see https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv...). That is why there is a conspiracy against a self perpetuating oligarchic government, that persecutes drag queens, that turns the many named hero of the story into a slave of the power that destroys him. Stadler could only have as his subject a paedophile because it is only form of sexual expression that has no lovers or supporters (except other paedophiles). Though the persecution of the drag queen Lucrezia is such an obvious pointer to the truth that this world is suppressing and attacking more than 'criminal' behavior.

In just over 200 pages Matthew Stadler in 1994 produced a novel that looked upon the world that was being born and saw that it was foul and that if we didn't fight to remove our blinkers and think then we were headed for nightmares.

Except now we are living in that nightmare.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stadler is a unique and gifted writer. In this 1994 novel, he relates the tale of a thirty-year-old man charged with molesting one of his pupils, a twelve-year-old boy, Dexter. I say “tale,” because the man’s incarceration does not happen as it would in the America we know—with jail time, a trial, and imprisonment or institutionalization or both. No, in this fanciful land (seems European in nature), the former teacher is plopped into therapy. One type is the talking kind conducted with the Doctor-General. Another is an “aversive” type in which he is to associate his love for Dexter with negative stimuli. It doesn’t work, of course. And ironically, the teacher finds another young boy, Hakan, upon whom he lavishes his love. Only this time, as far as I can tell, he does not engage sexually with the youth, only emotionally. And no one ever finds out!

So many “odd” elements to the narrative. The teacher also knows magically how to perform a kind of facelift, an element that figures heavily into the novel’s resolution. His therapist, Doctor-General, is experimenting with the notion of replacing a human’s brain so that one's impulses become “normal.” But nothing seems normal in this novel. The teacher still loves Dexter and insists that the boy loves him. However, the Doctor-General disabuses him of this notion, informing him that the boy is very unhappy (we have no idea if this is true or not, or why he is unhappy). In the end, the teacher believes he has fooled officials into thinking he is “cured” and hoping for release. Yet they proclaim he is not cured and perform a simple kind of castration on him. Snip snip, like that! And now finally, one understands the cover illustration, as the teacher dresses as a woman to attend an important function. Odd, odd, odd. But a great book because it forces us to consider a subject, that thirty years later, is still taboo. Were the Greeks and Romans “sex offenders,” too, or were they, in some manner, ahead of their time? It’s a notion worth considering, eh?

[The Book Girl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Previously posted on The Young Girl Who Loved Books

I normally will not write a review for any book that I can't find a single redeeming quality in. Man is this book bad.This is the story of pedophilia, a teacher falls in love with a student and the student is only twelve years old. This is something that we are seeing more and more across genders. Which perhaps says a lot about the values of some people. The thing that disturbed me the most was I never really felt like the author solved anything. He seemed to be condoning the actions of the teacher. It seemed he was allowing this abuse or anything that the teacher was in the wrong for being punished, even though in reality, he really wasn't punished. It made me sick in a lot of ways.

This book is ummm odd? It's umm extremely interesting, but not in a good way. I still can't seem to figure out the point of this little book or the purpose? I can't figure out what the heck is going on in this book. It is bizarre, creepy, crazy, and filled with obnoxious language. It is different than lolita which was disturbing but had a purpose. This book is not worth the time and effort of reading.

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an unusual allegory about a convicted pederast in an unnamed European country. The man is subjected to a series of unusual treatments and then is given a job performing plastic surgery on the prime minister. At this point, the book becomes haywire with numerous subplots and complications that became difficult to follow and I lost interest. The last 20 pages were a particular nightmare

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

More like a 2.5-3 actually, but a little bit too unbearable at times. Nabokov comparisons are accurate, but Lolita isn't, it's more Ada, or Ardor in parentage I'd say. That being said, I didn't find the world as compelling as that in Ada, or Ardor. I'll probably pick up Allan Stein if I do decide to revisit Matthew Stadler because the writing wasn't bad.

[Purr · Rating 2 out of 5]

i dont know....it took me weeks to finish this book

[Gary Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did Not Finish, pg 50

[Monty Milne · Rating 1 out of 5]

In this novel, Stadler constructs a parallel world as an intellectual stage on which to present his ideas. The first problem is that this parallel world is not convincingly realised, and remained for me too obviously the product of the author's own mental architecture. The second problem is that the ideas he presents are not easily digestible, nor even cogent - at least not to me. Such a pity when "Allan Stein" was written so brilliantly. I fear that Mr Stadler has made the same mistake made by Mr White when the latter left his superbly atmospheric autobiographical novels and entered the realm of unconvincing fantasy in "Caracole." A big disappointment.

[_inbetween_]

Curiously, this is neither outrageous nor dealing with paedophilia. I had wanted to read a truly challenging book, something potentially upsetting, and dealing with sex, but unlike the critics found the anti-hero's "confusing molestation with love" neither treated nor even shown, the state doing that very obvious, so what? It is indeed, like the cover says, "equal parts Kafka, Burgess and Brazil", as much as that is possible in 200 short pages - but not really anything else?

[Devon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is not worth the time and effort I put into trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

[Benjamin · Rating 1 out of 5]

A rudimentary search using gay, Lolita and fiction resulted in this craptacular waste of my time. Hoping for some insight into child sex predators (I'm researching a role), I'd better keep looking.

[Kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book, as I did reading Allan Stein, but had some trouble connecting to it, especially the characters. Lots of interesting ideas, and well-written, but not amazing.