Like the other heroes of Paul Zindel's books [Chris Boyd, hero of Confessions of a Teenage Baboon], can explain, in language that comes convincingly from a sixteen-year-old, what the bizarre circumstances of his life have brought him to. His mother is a kleptomaniac nurse who takes him round to her patients' houses when she's hired. In between jobs they live out of two suitcases and three shopping bags in a rundown rooming house called the Ritz Hotel. So, no home, no stability, and—since he ran off when Chris was five and then died—no father. Chris's baboonery strikes no one till he and his mother land up looking after an apparently sweet old lady with an apparently alcoholic, violent son of thirty called Lloyd. The sweet old lady turns out to have some odd habits (such as biting people) and her son some socially suspect attitudes and ways of behaving. But he does seem to care that Chris is being crushed by his mother and is lonely, dissatisfied, hopeless, and a loser; a degree of psychic disorder that calls for tough treatment, which, in his way, Lloyd seems to try and give him. The result: the police, blackmail, violence, death.
Is Lloyd a corrupter of local youth, as seems clear to most outsiders, certainly to anyone who accepts today's sexual and psychological clichés? Or a Socratic figure who gives youngsters self-knowledge and self-respect, and, out of his own failures, tries to teach them to overcome theirs?
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