[Forever …] is a story as told by the adolescent heroine, about an affair with another seventeen-year-old that germinates, burgeons and finally goes to seed. As a narrative technique, talking straight from the adolescent's mouth can also act as camouflage for slack writing, not entirely avoided here. Although it may be in character for the narrator to rhapsodize about eyes that are "very dark, with just a rim of green and other times they sparkle and are greenish-gray all over", it is still no less tedious to read. So if the author does manage to catch the almost inexorable egotism of some adolescents at this age, it is at the cost of producing a dull novel about two very dull young people, told in prose of the same soggy consistency as the used tissues that play such an important part in the couple's post-amatory techniques.
But it is just in this area, perhaps, that the book either justifies itself or not; if it is sex that is wanted, there is plenty of it here…. Yet even as a fictionalized sex manual, Forever is nowhere near as explicit as other material available for everyone today, nor is it as erotic as, for example, that "jolly little story" Fanny Hill. In fact, it is not erotic at all: its protagonists couple and separate like two well-lubricated automata, and if this novel is remarkable for anything, it is in its ability to trivialize sex, something that so far no puritan has ever managed to, perhaps even intended to do. There is an absence of poetry or passion about this couple; an emotional impotence in the midst of perfect physical health. (p. 1238)
Nicholas Tucker, in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1976: reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), October 1, 1976.
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