Introduction
Science has long recognized the delicate intricacies that arise in a mother-son relationship where the father is absent. The pitfalls for both parties have proven numerous.
A devoted mother will run the risk of sublimating her own needs out of a misdirected and uncontained "Love" for her male offspring, using him to fill the place of a man in her life. An over-zealous mother will shelter her son like a solicitous mother hen, or in her over-possessiveness she will refuse to allow him to develop normal relations with members of the opposite sex. An insecure boy will do everything he can to drive off prospective suitors for his mother's love. Or for the lack of a male influence in his life he will imitate his mother's mannerisms. Effeminacy and latent or active homosexuality may result. Either or both parties are inclined to have conscious or unconscious incestuous fantasies about the other.
In the following brilliant new novel by-----all the above possibilities exist. Jean Clayton widowed attractive mother of thirty-four, at the peak of her sexuality, and Stephan her fourteen-year-old son who looks very much like his slightly rakish father and is inclined to follow in his path, are the two central characters in this hard-hitting story of one boy's strange introduction to manhood and the opposite sex. Yet in spite of some sordid aspects of the story, it is in the end a love story of another kind, an initiation story in a modernized version of the Hemingway Nick Adam's tradition, a saga of temptation and struggle, defiance and final purgation as this young man and his mother, victims themselves of a great American tragedy, learn to live with themselves and with what they have done.
In a skillful manner,-----writes with penetrating insight of the delicate workings of a single human relationship. We, the publishers, feel sure that this intensely moving study of one aspect of contemporary society will be a welcome addition to the library of the mature adult reader.
-The Publishers
Archive Note: In the preceding introduction, you may have noticed places where the author's name would logically have been inserted into the text. This text file faithfully recreates the dashes which the publisher inserted instead. The actual pocketbook has nothing to indicate why the name was not used.