![]() ![]() ![]() Using a workman's tool, the child Gosse deliberately punctures a pipe that feeds a garden fountain his father has built. One rarely cited episode in the book that I find absolutely fascinating narrates the crime that midwifes the birth of Gosse's subjectivity. This book is quite good, but the author remains too much the decorous Victorian to write the memoir I would like to read. I wish the exquisitely descriptive Gosse of the 'rock pools' episode had been able to turn those powers upon the final confrontation between the two title characters, a crucial and climactic scene that Gosse buries in the Epilogue. Gosse's Father and Son is a superb and sometimes quite beautiful book (the apex of its beauty comes in the exquisite 'rock pools' episode), but I finish it wishing that the author had gone further-not only by throwing Victorian filial duty to the wind and more harshly criticizing his insufferable pater, but also by showing us more and telling us less, dramatizing more and summarizing less. ![]()
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