Never Let Me Go

While accounts of childhood sexual abuse have become depressingly pervasive, Rothenthal's bildungsroman is so remarkable that it transcends its tell-all genre. A prolific novelist (My Mistress, Humanity, etc.), Rosenthal was 13 when he entered into a relationship with his basketball coach that began as an intense, tough-love mentorship and escalated, through ""physical therapy sessions,"" into sex by inexorable degrees. What is so remarkable about his memoir, aside from its stunning honesty and its total refusal of self-indulgence, is the complex picture it paints of Dan Callahan, Rosenthal's coach, mentor, friend, confidant and abuser. A college history professor with a passion for the classics, Callahan is erudite, intelligent and appallingly self-deluded. His heightened understanding of others, matched with an absolute inability to recognize his own predatory motivations, makes him a masterful manipulator. It allows him to elevate his relationship with Rosenthal to a higher Aristotelian plane of idealized friendship, a friendship involving ""the love of a man for a boy, the love of a mentor, erudite and wise, for an exceptional boy."" Callahan assumes this role of altruistic mentor so totally that the horror one feels witnessing a boy's seduction, manipulation and abuse becomes strangely allayed by Rosenthal's eventual (and genuine) love for this man, and by their enduring friendship, even after Rosenthal has recognized Callahan for what he is. The book proper spans some eight years, and we watch Rosenthal's coming of age, the ways in which he comes to understand his abuse and the ways in which it permanently shapes him, with a sense of helpless inevitability. Rosenthal's writing, transparent and wholly unobtrusive, belies the tangled complexity of this relationship, and makes for an engrossing, disturbing and enlightening read.