Perv: A Love Story

Jerry Stahl's "Perv: A Love Story" made for some interesting reading on my honeymoon. It's a disturbing story, set in a Vietnam-era USA, struggling to regain its footing. The narrator is a teenager, kicked out of his prep school, who runs into an assortment of odd characters. He's a little bit like Holden Caulfield, but I found his attempts to figure out an off-kilter world a lot more interesting than Caulfield's angst about phonies. He runs away from his prescription drug addled mother, hooks up with a grade school crush (who herself is on the run from a Hare Krishna group), tries to understand the depth of his adolescent perversity, and the two end up with two truly frightening hippies travelling under the aliases of "Meat" and "Varnish". The book strikes many oddly nostalgic notes, as if the reader was remembering his or her own growing up through a lens of LSD and naugahyde. The final epiphany reaching climax, involving bi- (or was it tri-, or maybe try-)sexual rape in the back of a Lincoln is at odds horrifying and alluring. Over all I enjoyed this book, but those prone to being shocked or offended should probably steer clear. You can buy it at Amazon and give a small kickback to the Blender.

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