Heldenjaren.

Kops, Henri

"It is, I now realize, about me," comments P. F. Thomese in the jacket blurb to Heldenjaren. Herman, the novel's central character, persuades his parents to let him stay in Holland to complete his final year of high school while they and his two siblings emigrate to Canada. He fails to graduate, however, fabricating reasons for staying in the belief that someday he will somehow distinguish himself.

Peculiar though Herman is, the manifestations of his developing puberty strike him as they do many a youth, as when fear and shyness keep him from asking girls to dance or when he claims, "If you follow in your parents' footsteps, you are actually lost; so you choose certainty over uncertainty, and it is in uncertainty that mystery takes shelter." He moves into the large house of the family of a fellow pupil, a hyperactive scatterbrain who tinkers with broken appliances and speaks of girls as if providing machine-operating instructions.

Perhaps some people estranged from the conventional become good writers. Building on his autobiographical foundation, Thomese excels at pursuing results from a given action, speech, or mere illusion. In the process, Herman's adolescence causes the reader to reminisce, possibly even to identify with his experiences. Flowing Proustian introspection captures reflections and basic attitudes, including the frustration born of being left behind and isolated as an apathetic, inane late-teenager non-plussed by sexual urges. The youth's passive skepticism and habitual retreat into flights of imagination are constants: "Herman's skull, that poor, small skull, was already so full of things it did not comprehend. Rules had been drafted of which he had no knowledge. Everyone had been given a mission except for him. They knew, while he had only suppositions."

After an unsuccessful attempt at becoming a painter, Herman reluctantly moves in with another high-school classmate, a youth who "turned away from the world because he could not endure himself." Vegetating in the filthy disorder of a garret, he spends days on end replaying the chess matches of such champions as Capablanca, Alekhine, and Fischer. Eventually he takes on a paper route and later a temporary job as a bicycle courier. Failing to realize that he is going nowhere, he continues to wander expectantly still in daydreams.

The thirty-seven-year-old Thomese fashions language that is both disciplined and exact, including such foreign borrowings as Taugenichts, voila, booby-trap, and schlemiel. His scenes are sufficiently developed to introduce each of the eight significant characters, all of them carefully wrought. Physical actions are described with attentive yet light precision that engages the reader. Along the way, this basically sad subject allows humorous or ironic passages and even contributes a practical, hip guidance out of existentialist philosophy. The publisher's choice of firm, bright paper and a sharp typeface, as well as the hauntingly pertinent cover art by Evelien Nijeboer, facilitates one's patience with Herman's foibles and his pitiable adolescent struggles.

Henri Kops Fort Bragg, Ca.