Novel paints dull portrait of an intersex child’s life
Golden Boy bogged down by big issues
Abigail Tarttelin’s second novel, Golden Boy, appears to be intended for adult readers, though it may be better suited to a much younger audience.
Tarttelin’s main interest seems to be the exploration of social issues. Teen bullying, intersexual identities, rape and abortion are handled with a moralizing proficiency, and the novel would make for a decent introduction to different perspectives on each of what are exceedingly unambiguous themes of the book.
At its worst, the book reads like it was reverse-engineered from some kind of progressive high school teacher’s essay assignment.
The titular boy, Max Walker, is the intersex child of a prominent political family in a small, wealthy burg outside Oxford, England. Max was born with two sets of chromosomes, both XX and XY, making him something of a medical anomaly.
The term intersex applies to a wide range of individuals who have biological characteristics, be they anatomical or chromosomal, that are not described by the conventional male/female dichotomy.
There is a long history of violence perpetrated on bodies that fall outside of socially prescribed norms, and Golden Boy touches very briefly on the changing attitudes physicians and psychologists are adopting in response to a more humane understanding of the human race’s biological diversity.
Each chapter of the novel is written from the first-person perspective of someone close to the Walker family: Max, his mother or father, his younger brother, Daniel, his girlfriend, Sylvie, and his new, openminded physician, Archie, who seems to have been included principally as a means of conveying to the reader the biological and medical knowledge required to understand something concrete about the condition of being intersex.
According to the Intersex Society of North America, one or two out of every 1,500 babies born on this continent present ambiguous sexual anatomy, and it is unknown how many people in the world are chromosomally intersex.
Unlike Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex (2002), or Kathleen Winter’s Annabel (2010), Tarttelin’s efforts in Golden Boy make no use of the wonder of language or literary forms to invest in the inherent ambiguity of her subject. The device of switching back and forth from different characters’ perspectives grows tedious and is employed to inconsistent effect.
Chapters are arranged chronologically, and though the story traces the after-effects of a traumatic event (Max is raped by a family friend about 10 pages in), I can’t help but wonder if the novel would have been better if the violence wasn’t ushered in so rapidly — the shocking opening to the story that initially seemed so unbearably brutal wears thin once the story moves on.
Golden Boy is weighed down by its adherence to responsibly describing capital-I-issues. Though the novel seems to be presented as some kind of Very Special Episode, Golden Boy itself is, as a work of literary fiction, completely unremarkable.