Special to the American-Statesman
Sunday, December 23, 2001
Autobiographical fiction can be distracting. If the book is not smoothly executed, the reader is always wondering what is fact and what is fiction.
That said, Stephen Elliott's novel "A Life Without Consequences," although clearly semi-autobiographical, should absorb the reader absolutely. What matters here isn't truth versus fiction, but the subtle beauty of the portrait Elliott paints of a shockingly grim world -- the child welfare system and one young man's painful but triumphant passage through it.
Paul Burke is 14 when we first meet him; instead of attending school he is homeless and trying to cope with the death of his mother and a brutal father.
After his father has handcuffed him to a radiator, beaten him repeatedly and finally shaved his head in a bizarre form of punishment, Paul escapes again to the streets of Chicago, where he has lived already for a year on rooftops and in boiler rooms. He slashes his wrist with a tin can, is found by authorities and is taken to a mental hospital for "troubled" teens.
The teen-agers in the hospital form a family unit none of them has had. Paul wants to go to school. "I write poetry," he tells his caseworker. His hopes for school are sidetracked when he falls in love with a girl named Tanya and runs away from the mental hospital with her.
A Chicago winter is approaching, and Paul and Tanya live how and where they can. "We are not pretty. We are two ugly homeless kids trying to relax in a tool shed. But the moment is pretty. The moment is beautiful." It is this ability of Paul's to see beyond the immediate that later will save him. But suddenly the police come and remove Tanya from the tool shed with force, shaving off Paul's only sliver of happiness: "When they push her in the car I can't hear her screaming anymore. And that's all there is."
Paul is placed in a group home, where he makes new friends and searches for Tanya and other old friends. He also is offered a deal by an administrator: Make straight A's in the system's school and he will be allowed attend the local high school. It is here we begin to see more of Paul's innate intelligence; he understands that education will provide him an out.
In high school he begins to date a "normal" girl, Jessica, a cheerleader from a well-to-do family. He qualifies for honors classes and excels on the chess team, competing statewide. Occasionally he hears from Tanya, who will not disclose her whereabouts for fear he will not come to see her. It is Tanya, we realize, with whom Paul is in love; although he dates Jessica for a long time, he tells her, "You don't need me. You're already complete. I need someone who is not complete because I am not complete . . . You're too strong."
Paul's strength, though, is greater than he knows, and the novel ends with progress on two fronts.
Laura Anderson writes and reviews for several publications.
A Life Without Consequences By Stephen Elliott, MacAdams/Cage, $25