‘You are in the polymorphous-perverse stage,’ the school psychiatrist tells the assembled boys of Favorite River Academy in Vermont in the late 1950s. Just how polymorphously perverse his audience turns out to be would have surprised even Dr Grau, had he not fallen over drunk one evening and frozen to death.
It is no accident that the all-male private school in which much of the action of John Irving’s new novel takes place should be in a town with the unusual name of First Sisters. Irving’s narrator is a bisexual novelist called William Abbott, known to friends and family as Billy. ‘Abbott’ is in fact the name of his stepfather, who teaches at the school: Billy’s real father disappeared during the boy’s infancy and is rarely talked about.
During his time as a pupil at Favorite River, Billy develops a succession of ‘crushes on the wrong people’, including his stepfather, the school’s wrestling champion, Jacques Kitteridge, and several much older women.
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