Volume 18, Number 8 · May 4, 1972
Whom Can You Trust?
By Roger Sale
Hide Fox, and All After
by Rafael Yglesias
Doubleday, 203 pp., $5.95
Muriel
by George P. Elliott
Dutton, 154 pp., $5.95
Rites of Passage
by Joanne Greenberg
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 197 pp., $6.95
Hermaphrodeity
by Alan Friedman
Knopf, 426 pp., $7.95
In the month preceding the publication of Rafael Yglesias's Hide Fox, and All After, his parents each published a novel too. It is such a charming feat—like nothing I can think of since Byron and the Shelleys agreed one autumn afternoon to write something set in their Swiss surroundings, out of which came 'The Prisoner of Chillon' and Frankenstein—that it is hard not to think that at least one and maybe all three novels by the Yglesias family were written just to show it could be done. Rafael's, written when he was fifteen, looks like such a work. It is short, amiably formless, one presumes autobiographical, about a few months in the life of a fourteen-year-old freshman at a pretentious private school in New York. But the wonder is not that it was written but that it is very good indeed, far from something one wants to congratulate because its author is young or because it may have been written because everyone else in the family was writing novels and Rafael decided to do one too.
Review, 4723 words
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