| Book: | Wrinkles |
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| Author: | Charles Simmons |
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| Publisher: | Farrar Straus & Giroux (T) |
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More than forty terse chapters, each a “biography” in miniature, coalesce into this affecting novel, an honest, poignant, often humorous account of all aspects of a man’s life. Each of these chapters begins with the “then” of childhood and youth, proceeds to the “now” of the middle years, and ends with a projection of the inevitabilities of old age. Each, too, develops a theme, a person, a place, a possession, an attribute, a desire, a fear, important to the protagonist and, indeed, to everyone. Among these themes are parents, brother, wife, children, friends, lovers; houses, schools, jobs; clothes, movies, games, money; driving, clowning, drinking, cheating; religion and sexuality; love, lust, sleep, illness, death.
Unlike these abstractions, Wrinkles is concrete, richly detailed, precise in its evocation of the past, the vivid present, an imagined future. We see what the child saw when he looked into the mirror, what the boy saw later, what the man sees now, and what someday the old man will see. How the child loved; how the man loves; how the old man will love.
