DOWN AND OUT IN CAMBRIDGE

by Douglas Fairbairn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 22, 1981

Memoirs of a scruffy, often sad adolescence and young-adulthood--with budding novelist Fairbairn (A Man's World, Shoot) down and out not just in Cambridge circa 1950 (where he sort of went to Harvard) but everywhere else too. Home was Miami and tacky nearby resort spots, with mother Missy and hapless stepfather Wes (who had quickly gone through an inheritance from his rich first wife). Doug grew up to be a terrified-of-everything bedwetter, then an outsider at St. Mark's prep and a quick expell-ee from his first stint at Harvard (for throwing 27 quart beer bottles out a fourth-floor window). And when Missy died in protracted, brain-damaged agony, 19-year-old Doug buried himself in writing a novel--the first 100 pages of which elicited an encouraging letter from a N.Y. editor. But that momentary bright spot would be the only one (other than a romance or two) for the next few years: penniless, aging undergrad Doug tried Harvard again and again, on loans and on the sly (he lived illegally, unsanitarily, at the Lampoon offices, getting by on stolen petty cash); he ruined those first 100 pages with rewriting, couldn't finish the book, but pathetically established himself a ""romantic"" campus identity as Promising Novelist. And, after being reduced to guinea-pigdom ($100 for 30 days of tests in a hospital), he pretty much gave up on Cambridge, becoming a Miami-based deckhand--which led him to Cannes, to a romance (rather pallid) with a French girl, to the material for his real first novel at last. Fairbairn is less than selective in his reminiscences: some of the childhood material is just dreary, some of the Harvard Square anecdotes seem mostly for-alumni-only. (Fairbairn's summer roommates at the Lampoon included young G. Plimpton and young actor Fred Gwynne.) And the tone is a somewhat uneasy mix of flip self-deprecation, self-pity, nostalgia, and--especially in funny-awful scenes with stepfather Wes--staged comedy. But, with a series of genuinely grim predicaments and an unpredictable range of well-captured milieux, this coming-of-age picaresque offers a fair mix of farce and pathos, if not much in the way of narrative shape or strong involvement.

Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1981

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1981

Categories: NONFICTION