Usually my choice of what to read is predetermined—I've seen a review, or there's been a recommendation, possibly from one of you. Very rarely do I go in a bookstore and browse; no way any budget could cover such a financially damaging activity. But, curiously enough, that's how I acquired Age of Consent by Howard Mittelmark. The cover art—a creepy house and a pair of blue eyes, reminiscent of The Village of the Damned—attracted me, and the cover blurb—"kids will be kids—even if it kills them"—sealed the bargain. Upon completion, the book turned out to be both better and worse than I expected it to be.
The story itself was part of the better. An only-partly-crazy-at-the-beginning-of-the-book professor of religion buys the Oneida House in upstate New York,a house near the college where he is to start a new teaching job. Historically the place has had two other owners: Joseph Smith of Mormon fame in the 19th century and a group of hippie, wannabe terrorists in 1971. The story bounces back and forth from the present to 1971, with one ghostly man appearing in pictures from all three times. It's pretty cool, moving into an attempt at meaningful when the religion professor has a breakthrough and discovers that evil exists because "God wanted man to suffer." (page 223) Following this insight, characters who had any degree of sanity lose it, and all three eras connect.
Now we're left with the worse side. While errors did not appear on every page, Age of Consent is one of the most poorly written books I've ever read. At first I kept thinking an editor should have caught most of the problems, and I was ready to give the author a break—until I noticed the blurb on him said he was both a writer and an editor. Gloves came off; here's the worst:
1) The son of the religion professor has lived all his life in Brooklyn. He'd been an overweight loner, ignored by his father and unpopular at school. Based on that thumbnail sketch, I found it really odd that he would recognize a small baseball club as "the kind fishermen use to bash in the heads of the spikier, nonedible fish they reeled in, the ones that were all bones and spikes." (page 95) Hello? I find it distracting when characters know things that seem totally outside their life experiences. (And I won't even make a big deal out of the fact that neither Word nor the online American Heritage Dictionary recognize nonedible as a word.)
2) "She turned to rejoin her friends in the living room and saw Phil coming down the hallway from the kitchen." (page 230) The next sentence describes Phil searching through a drawer in he kitchen. Three readings later I figured out "she" was the one "coming down the hallway." Gimme a break. It's junior high grammar. A diagram would have pointed out the error to Mr. Mittelmark, the author and editor. Insert a snort of disgust.
All in all, I can't say the book is bad. I kept turning pages, often appalled, sometimes amused, but always curious about what would happen next.
