Call It Sleep

Bluntly speaking, I do not like Call It Sleep by Henry Roth.  It is, to be fair, very skilled in conveying a very true adolescent, but this perhaps reveals that I do not like real children (which really is no surprise).  I found David Schearl to be whiney, spineless, and overly attached to his mother, which really bothers and freaks me out.  I do not understand or handle well people who have strange obsessions with their parents, and it makes me very uncomfortable.

I suppose it would seem that I am being unfair by identifying a 6-9 year old boy as being annoyingly dependent, but in comparison to the other boys that surround him, Davy has been guarded from maturity because of his mother's affection.  There must be a point in a child's life where he realizes he wants to be a part of others his age, I think, but it never really seems to happen with this main character.  Case in point, this kid creeps me out.

Roth also does some stylistically out-of-the-box things like characterizing accents through phonetic spelling, capturing David's internal thought process through jumbled, fast moving nonsense, as well as a scene toward the end where two separate situations are woven between themselves in abrupt cuts until they collide at the climax.  However avant-garde this may be (I'm blindly assuming that to be true), it was for me, very annoying and I often found myself scanning and skipping these sections because they were so hard to read, confusing, and ultimately unimportant to the bigger picture (forgettable, for lack of a better word).

The only part of the book that I found interesting was the first section, which I found to be very pretty and emotional.  Not so coincidentally, this is the only section that is not written from the child's point of view.  When the father tosses the child's hat overboard, it is an immensely weighted moment, and I commend Roth for such a well played choice of action for Albert Schearl to do to his newly reunited family.  Props.

What I do like more than this scene, is when people share their love for a book in a very convincing manner.  There is an afterword by Walter Allen in my copy that was so well-written that I started to appreciate some of his points, though not to the point that it would make me forget all of the unpleasantness I felt throughout my read.

Also, as a side-note, my copy is from 1971 and the pages look ribbed/textured when held up to the light.  I am incredibly fascinated by this -- there is a sense of corrosion as well as a very handmade feel to it that I am drawn to.  Also, I really like the cover image of clothes drying on a line.