THE MOTHER OF DAVID S.

by Yvonne Keuls ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 30, 1986

A well-meaning but suffocatingly earnest first novel originally published in Great Britain and aimed at parents whose children are drug abusers. Keuls plunges her readers right into a maelstrom of crisis: it's 1963 and Simon and Lena S. are a young Dutch couple on the way up: Simon as an architect, Lena as a painter. All changes when Lena gives birth to David, a child with the soul of a poltergeist, given to screaming tantrums and rages for no earthly reason any doctor can ascertain. With this dour foreshadowing, the story leaps ahead to the mid-70's; Simon is indeed a successful architect, although Lena's painting has given way to the diapers and skinned knees of four children. Still, they're a happy enough family until 15-year-old David begins to live up to his early promise. He becomes surly and withdrawn, gets kicked out of school, and spends all his time hanging around his incense-fried room listening to Frank Zappa records. It takes a while for the S.'s (who are far too innocent for a still-young couple in 1975) to catch on, but they finally do when they return from vacation to find their home filled with wretchedly spaced. out teen-agers, and David passed out upstairs. Keuls then takes David down a textbook-straight trail from hash to LSD to speed to heroin. He's in and out of mental hospitals and treatment centers, gets in trouble with the cops and the underworld, cons money out of his beloved grandmother, and manipulates Simon and Lena until Simon has a nervous breakdown and Lena becomes physically ill. Lena finally saves the S.'s by joining a group called Families Anonymous, but the novel ends on a grimly realistic note as David heads off in search of another fix. In sum: a cautionary tale that's all caution and no tale, with impassioned statistic-filled lectures in the place of dialogue, and ""composites"" (drawn from Keuls' experiences working with drug-addicted children) in the place of fully-realized characters. It's a diatribe--on the side of the angels, to be sure--but a diatribe all the same.

Pub Date: June 30, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION