cover image Lampshades

Lampshades

Carole Morin. Overlook Press, $22.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-87951-857-8

British journalist Morin (Dead Glamorous) plays with fire in her first novel by making her heroine, Scottish 16-year-old Sophira Van Ness, a Hitler fan. After her despised mother suddenly departs for India, Sophira falls in with young people who have joined the staff of Balmoral Castle (Queen Elizabeth's Scotland residence) and befriends a charismatic boy named Jack Gray. Sophira goes to London with him, where he deserts her. She takes up with a Count Saadi, a concentration-camp survivor who is financing a bio-pic about Adolf Hitler. All of these incidents are told in exclamation-punctuated prose that seems to want to race the reader to the end of the page, as if the point of writing were who gets there first. The slang, the dismissive comments of Sophira and the set pieces (as when Sophira encounters the Queen in the loo) provide some funny moments. Sophira is a veritable collection of abhorrences--she hates ""fat gut buckets,"" the middle-aged, the body in general, blacks, Jews and all her living relatives. With her need to keep an eye open for bathrooms wherever she is, she is recognizably a type from the dark side of adolescence, so that it makes sense from her perspective that Hitler is one of the flowers of evil, a sort of Aubrey Beardsley picture come to life. The problem is that, of course, that doesn't make sense from any other perspective. This is a high-wire act, and Morin missteps when she introduces Count Saadi and his brother, who are reminiscent of the kind of decadent Jewish stereotypes of Nazi propaganda. For all the talent on display here, the novel fails to overcome this jarring lapse of taste. (Aug.)