Wrinkles

In an age when fiction is purchased by the pound, a novel as brief as "Wrinkles," though it is as close to "perfect" as a work of art can be, is in danger of being devalued in the marketplace. Bookbuyers who pass it over for one of the heftier titles on the rack, however, will be missing an exhilarating reading experience. I've never encountered a novel quite like "Wrinkles." The chapters are short, usually about two-and-a-half pages long. Each examines a facet of the protagonist's life. Family, sex, work, religion, finances, friendship, romance, etc., are held as if before a jeweler's glass. Each begins in childhood, progresses to a present, indefinite middle age, and concludes in a prediction about how this particular aspect of his life will turn out. It is as effective a way of telling a character's history as it is unusual. Charles Simmons was a 58-year-old editor at The New York Times Book Review when this, his third novel, was released. The first, "Powdered Eggs," published almost 20 years earlier, was a hilarious look at the experience of being raised Roman Catholic. Introduced seven years later, "An Old-Fashioned Darling" was a sendup of men's magazines. "Wrinkles," issued three years after "An Old-Fashioned Darling," he says began as a series of short meditations on the past, present and future of a man like himself. An output so sparse suggests that the author has been unusually conscientious, and indeed this work is not only brilliantly conceived but beautifully crafted as well. I doubt that many males will read it without sustaining flashes of recognition and without laughing aloud. This one you shouldn't miss.

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 inevitablilites 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.