The Beginning of Calamities: A Novel

by Tom House

The novel is set in a blue-collar Long Island suburb in the 1970's. It is an elegantly written, moving story of the awkwardness and agony of childhood.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a difficult novel to rate and shelve because it is one that I had wanted to read for a long time and whose premise - how Danny Burke, a shy, destined-to-be-gay 11 year old produces a Catholic School play that goes hilariously awry - had just so much promise - and the novel also received incredible prepublication boosts from writers like David Ebershoff and Alice Sebold - I was expecting a novel as brilliant as The Kryptonite Kid by Joseph Torchia (see my footnote *1 below) in the way it extracted humour from the struggles of a young boy to understand and come to terms with the world's falsity and complexity. But Tom House (and I must mention I had read quite a few excellent short stories by him) doesn't keep his story focused on Danny, at times he disappears and his teacher and mother, for example come to dominate the narrative. Plus there is Danny's imaginary friend, Arrun, conjured up out of an image in the family bible illustrating a story which no Bible I know contains. But the story of Danny's relationship with his imaginary friend Arrun really is more than enough for a novel by itself but here it, like so many other threads, gets lost and becomes simply an excuse for the ending(which I am not going to tell you).

Stories using a child, or children - like Lord of the Flies or Night of the Buds, Shoot the Kids - as a vehicle for looking at adult behavior can be brilliant. Children don't know so many things, so many they do they take on trust, this can be called innocence or ignorance and in their own way children can be manipulative. Equally their very ignorance/innocence can allow them to manipulate themselves in seemingly perverse ways or to respond literally to adult hypocrisy. It is what makes The Kryptonite Kid so powerful, funny and heart breaking and because it deals with children within the moral/cultural outlook of the 1960s and or 1970s and a catholic school and had hoped The Beginnings of Calamities would do the same. Unfortunately it was published in 2004 and although it maybe inspired by the authors own experiences he fails completely to either conjure up the era or to convince me he has anything but the vaguest recollection of the tenets of the Catholic faith. In addition the humour gets lost, or abandoned as he leaves Danny to spend more time with his teacher and mother.

It is not badly written but it is not engaging. If I hadn't bought a copy I wouldn't have finished it.




*1 I am perfectly aware that almost no one reading this review will have read Torchia's brilliant book, I don't care the comparison is apt and I encourage one person to read The Kryptonite Kid and I would be deleriously happy.

[Cyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coming of age, religious ecstasy, sexual awakening, dark comedy--this novel is hard to categorize and equally hard to put down.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this quite tedious and couldn't warm to any of the characters. In my opinion the theme of being a religious-minded Catholic schoolboy was handled much better and to hilarious effect in Michael Carson's book "Sucking Sherbet Lemons".