Loverboy

In Redel's controlled and convincing tale of a mother's obsession for her child, the first-person narrator endangers the life of her grade-school son, then asks rhetorically, ""Has a mother ever loved a child more?"" It is a disturbing question, since the entire novel proves to be the narrator's heartfelt demonstration of her single-minded devotion to the raising of her son, Paul. Conceived anonymously (""I never wanted a house and I never wanted a husband,"" remarks the narrator, who remains nameless and without a definite address), Paul is his mother's central passion; her own perilously solipsistic parents died in a suicide pact. Slavish in her attention to her son, she does not use contractions because they are lazy and calls him by anything (Loverboy, Babydoll) but his name because she cannot bear for him to join the ranks of the ordinary, school-taught drones. Beautifully succinct, lyrically composed chapters give occasionally disturbing glimpses of the narrator gravely ill in a hospital room, but not until the end of the novel does the reader become chillingly aware of how she has resisted the intrusion of the real world. Hints of her obsessive possessiveness crop up strategically: she secretly euthanatizes a sick baby bird they have found so that her son doesn't have to see it die; she lies about doctor appointments in order to take the boy out of school and off on magical junkets together. Painting a convincing portrait of her complex and surprisingly sympathetic narrator, Redel (Where the Road Bottoms Out) makes it possible to empathize with the woman's overwhelming love for her son: the novel succeeds because the reader cannot condemn her. (Apr.)