Cycle of Abuse Yields Flawed Tale of Identity

It is seldom easy to approach a book whose subject matter is disturbing and potentially inflammatory from the outset. The reader must monitor his own responses carefully, watching to make sure that he doesn’t react to the material but rather to the way it is treated. Every manifestation of human experience is suitable for fiction, but between suitable and successful the terrain is wide open and often difficult to negotiate.

Keith Banner’s first novel, “The Life I Lead,” addresses the subject of pederasty and the legacy the experience leaves, both on the molester and on the boy (later the man) he molests. To Banner’s credit, his informing approach is seldom sensational or simplistic. He draws his characters with compassion and without facile judgment. He allows for contradiction and ambivalence. But the reader will not come away from this novel with any transforming comprehension of the way pederasts are made. He will have seen them in action but not rendered with the kind of insight the issue calls for.

In our confessional, psychotherapy-streamlined culture, we are increasingly accustomed to having human nature explained through direct rhythms of cause and effect. In “The Life I Lead,” because Troy Wetzel was raised in an orphanage, adopted late (at age 11) by an alcoholic woman and neglectful man, and had a large appetite for little boys, he causes David Brewer, the object of his affection and himself the son of an abusive father, to also become a pederast. These patterns may be part of the etiology of molestation, but the task of fiction is to make such patterns feel unprecedented and alarming, not cultural or psychological shorthand.

The other central weakness in “The Life I Lead” is that the author never seems interested in his main characters when they are not grappling with their sexual selves. Likewise, the surrounding characters--the parents of Troy and David, David’s wife and his friends--feel only perfunctorily investigated, when their participation in (or ignorance of) Troy and David’s behavior is essential to their stories.

Banner may be making a point about the nature of sexual obsession here--that it devours the person who becomes obsessed--but the choice makes for uneven storytelling. Some of this unevenness may derive from the way Banner has chosen to tell his story, through a collage of first-person testimonials that alternate between time present and the early 1970s, when Troy, 16, repeatedly molested Dave, 6.

While these testimonials unbalance the novel, they are also its lifeblood. The portrait of Troy accrues from the mixture of guilt and pleasure he feels regarding “all those wonderful yet evil things” he did to Dave. Troy interestingly combines self-awareness with self-delusion. He recognizes himself as a molester. Yet he frequently swings back to less reasonable positions: David, for example, is “the only person I think I have ever truly loved.” And: “Sometimes it felt like he was leading me.”

If in examining his past life Troy alternately engages the reader’s sympathy (by displaying some self-understanding) and repels it (by attributing culpability to a 6-year-old boy and mistaking abuse for love), David remains more of a pederast-in-progress and his behavior is more harrowing to follow. Married to Tara and father of Brittany, David is obsessed with a 7-year-old boy, Nathan, who “has become my only reason to live.” Echoing Troy, David says, “I wanted him to know my love through fear.”

The cycle of abuse as a confused search for one’s own broken self? There is a powerful idea here, lost amid all the gradations of obsession and the flagging writing. It may be unreasonable to expect Banner to repair his characters, but it is not inappropriate to want to understand--or at least to witness--this particular breakage as we have never seen it before.