Book Reviews : A Forgiving Portrait of a Precocious Opportunist

That’s My Baby by Norma Klein (Viking: $16.95; 211 pages)

You can’t help feeling charmed by amiable Paul Gold, the 18-year-old protagonist of Norma Klein’s nervy and often charming new novel. He’s smart, ambitious, forthright and wittily self-deprecating. Where was Gold when I was in high school?

He’s inclined as much toward romance as sex but readily admits he’s a bungler: “I was the type who gazed from afar, decided it was hopeless, or would wait endlessly until whoever it was found someone else. Or there’d be things like the Kitty Berg incident . . . by the time I finally got my act together with Kitty mentally . . . she’d decided she was gay. Some women drive men to the bottle. I make women switch their sexual orientation.”

He’s so consistently guileless, so willing to own up to and remedy his mistakes when trouble arises, that you begin to wonder if this guy’s for real. After all, it’s the ‘80s. The setting is Manhattan. Where are the parties, the drugs and cynical sex? A budding playwright, Paul seems like Renaissance man in a teen-ager’s body.

Awkward Sex Scene

Then, one fateful night, Paul and his good pal Sonja drink a little too much. They share a woozy taxi ride home during which Sonja tells him breathily that he smells like “wine and violins and pine cones” and speculates that she’s falling in love. An appropriately awkward sex scene follows, recounted here from Paul’s bemused perspective: “It was like one of those Disney movies I used to see as a child where in one scene the flower is tightly coiled, and in the next it’s in full bloom. So at one point we had all our clothes on, and at another later point . . . we had no clothes on. And then . . . well, if this was a ‘40s movie, it would pan to the crashing surf. But then we were making love, only . . . I think we were both still pretending we weren’t.”

Neither character feels a speck of guilt, although Paul wryly imagines a pre-coital comeuppance by Jerry Falwell. Still, since virginity is something to be gotten rid of eventually, why not with a friend you can trust?

Next morning, however, Sonja’s expectations linger. “ ‘I was a virgin till last night,’ ” she laments, heartbroken to discover that Paul’s lust hasn’t yielded to love. “ ‘Me too,’ ” he quips. “ ‘At least neither of us will get VD.’ ”

Is Paul beginning to sound like the glib and callow teen-agers you’ve known and loved? In his somewhat fallen state, he’s less heroic but certainly more genuine. As much a victim of his innocence as Sonja is, he’s more opportunist than seducer.

A Dreamy Arrogance

Some months later, he meets Zoe Bernstein, a 22-year-old beauty married to an affluent older man (also named Paul) who owns a chain of orthopedic shoe stores. Zoe hires young Paul to walk her dog, Baby, so that Zoe can attend afternoon classes at a nearby college. And thus begin Paul’s fantasies about a seemingly unattainable lady and her dead-end middle-class marriage.

A kind of dreamy arrogance surfaces in Paul as he imagines what he might offer Zoe--mostly in the way of sexual gratification--as compared with her beefy, stolid husband who’s so preoccupied with cash flow. For Paul, winning Zoe’s favors becomes a contest between youth and age, the freedoms of indulgence versus the shackles of accountability.

Several subplots give Zoe and Paul’s inevitable romance context and resonance. Rejected Sonja makes trouble for Paul when his play, “Just Friends”--based on their hapless coupling--is chosen to be produced by the high school drama club. Paul’s rather flaky father, with whom he lives, remarries. And there are glimpses of Paul’s domestically frazzled mother with her second rollicking family--all of which underscores Paul’s role as outsider, the sheepish wolfling at Zoe’s door, mostly hungry for connection.

A Childish Disregard

Unfortunately, after he gets what he wants--Zoe--Paul lapses into childish disregard of any impediments to his pleasure. He cajoles Zoe with hedonistic persuasiveness into taking foolish risks. At every opportunity, he disparages her husband, whose values he detests. His arguments with Zoe are artlessly strident with youthful bombast and naivete. At one point, when she confronts him about his lack of experience with life, Paul tells her hotly, “ ‘I don’t need experience to know what I want.’ ”

One grows impatient with Paul’s rash, simplistic judgments concerning the complexities of marital relationship (his parents’ adolescent marriage broke up when he was a baby). Zoe would tire of him, I think, were she still not so young and uncertain of herself. They cling to each other like babes in a woods crisscrossed with pathways that necessarily lead to responsibilities. Then, for starters, Zoe gets pregnant.

Norma Klein, the highly praised author of more than 20 books, knows exactly what she’s doing. She hasn’t set out to make Paul Gold shine. She’s set out to make him authentic: vulnerable, flawed, and very much of the here and now. He may be intellectually precocious, but his heart has just begun its apprenticeship. He may be talented, transforming personal heartache into plays, but by the novel’s end, he’s still struggling to produce “art” and is somewhat chastened by the knowledge that truth and reality don’t always coincide.

Written with spunk and insight, “That’s My Baby” is an affectionate, forgiving portrait of a very young contemporary artist as a very young contemporary man.