Product Description
This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a teacher who has had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. While the man's crime was to mistake molestation for love, his cure will partake of the same confusion: to help and rehabilitate him, the police and the doctors subject the teacher to increasingly bizarre forms of therapy. Called "an astonishment" by Dennis Cooper, The Sex Offender weds compelling mystery with comedy, satire, and politics.
Product Details
| Publisher | Grove Press |
| ISBN | 0802136958 |
| Format | Paperback |
| Author | Matthew Stadler |
| EAN | 9780802136954 |
| Is Adult Product | No |
| Label | Grove Press |
| Edition | Reprint |
| Dewey Decimal Number | 813.54 |
| Studio | Grove Press |
| Number Of Pages | 224 |
| Title | The Sex Offender |
| Publication Date | 2000-05-03 |
| Manufacturer | Grove Press |
Customer Reviews
Startling and enlightening at the same timeReview by Cynthia Lyles Scott, 2008-05-03
I didn't know what to expect from Matthew Stadler, but when my class in literature and sexuality required me to purchase this book, I gladly did so and read it cover to cover. I can't say that it didn't make me uncomfortable, because it very much did. But it also helped me to understand the sickness of love and pedophilia and what happens when you confuse one with the other.
Jean Genet for the MTV generation.......?
Review by Mark Nadja, 2007-07-08
How do you write a novel about pederasty, pornography, brainwashing, Orwellian totalitarianism, and revolution, give it an irresistible title, and yet manage to make it a tedious bore to read? It would seem to be almost impossible. But Matthew Stadler has done exactly that with *The Sex Offender.*
The time is an unspecified future; the place, a sexually repressive dystopia. Our narrator is the sex offender of the title: an ex-teacher, guilty of conducting a love affair with one of his underage students. He is sentenced to a radical program of mental reconditioning to rid him of his outlaw desires. That's the way it's done in this unenlightened but humane future. He is given the name `Mr. Uh-Uh' to preserve his anonymity so that stigma won't follow him the rest of his life after he's cured. I can't tell you how annoying and silly it seemed to me to hear other characters address our narrator as "Mr. Uh-Uh." It was a real relief when he was finally given the new name of `Mr. Sludge.'
Anyway, Mr. Sludge is supposed to be writing a memoir of his crime--a sort of confession/autobiography that will supposedly have a therapeutic effect, not to mention add to the library of resource materials culled from felons like himself. But suddenly, and more than a bit inexplicably, Mr. Sludge is recruited to become a kind of radical cosmetic surgeon at the super-secret `Salon,' which provides powerful political figures upkeep on their iconographic public images.
Meanwhile, there's a revolution afoot that seems to be gathered around the return of a totemic drag queen exiled back in a time that by comparison now seems a golden age of sexual diversity and tolerance. One of the rebels, a beautiful boy named, of all things, Hakan, ((he's Turkish, you see, a favorite archetype for connoisseurs of this sort of thing)) ends up sharing our narrator's board--and bed. It seems the mental conditioning isn't working on Mr. Sludge.
Something more drastic needs to be done about him.
It's often difficult to read *The Sex Offender* as anything but a thinly-veiled excuse to pen steamy romantic love scenes between the narrator and the underage Hakan while still maintaining the thinnest veneer of social responsibility. But I don't buy it. I found a lot of *The Sex Offender* pretty distasteful precisely because you get the creepy feeling that the author is being disingenuous and is really getting off on what he is lamely condemning.
The only thing remarkable, or `shocking' about this book is that it is presented in the current climate of zero tolerance for pederasts. All of what's here has been done before and done much better. This is Jean Genet Lite or William S. Burroughs for Dummies. If you're going to read perversion, go for the masters! Its short--205 pages--so its got that going for it, you won't waste too much of your time. And there are some lyric passages and some startling imagery and disturbingly surreal touches--but, in the end, *The Sex Offender* is a seedy disappointment.
Descriptive or predictive?
Review by D. Elliot, 2006-10-16
A brilliant and captivating work. A novel that received the accolade of "an astonishment" from the genius that is Dennis Cooper, immediately you know that you're in for an unforgettable journey. Having previously read 'Allan Stein' by the same author, I naturally had preconceptions about 'The Sex Offender' - all of which were trampled on. Matthew Stadler's incredible talent is evident from the fact that two novels entirely unrecognisable from one another in tone and style could emerge from the same pen (or keyboard), and yet be equally powerful.
'The Sex Offender' is difficult to categorise, but if you think 'A Clockwork Orange' and '1984', then you'd start out along the right lines. The primary thread of the story is that our protagonist, a former teacher, is undergoing "rehabilitation" for having an illicit (consensual) relationship with a 12 year old pupil. This 'treatment' initially takes the form of electric shock aversion-style therapy, which shifts it's focus as the teacher (inevitably) proves 'resistant' to the attempts to transform his nature.
However, the scope of this ambitious work is far wider than the issue of whether such treatment can merely 'neuter' rather than 'reform' the patient. The key is the setting of the novel: an unspecified (future?) time, when the State is infallible and omnipotent and the populace are controlled through an elaborate means of propaganda and heavy restrictions on individual liberty. While undergoing 'treatment', our teacher meets, and becomes infatuated with, an adolescent boy who works for a deluded group of rebels seeking to overthrow the State and seize power for their own leader. As a patient of the Doctor-General for the 'Department of Crime and Health' (note the correlation of these areas of society) the teacher becomes embroiled both with the promulgation of the existing State and with the rebel's goal of revolution.
These twin stories of 'sexual crime' and a controlling State serve as an exceptionally apt tool for an examination of the nature and powers of the State versus individual freedom. Matthew Stadler's novel is in many ways as descriptive of the State as it exists today, as it is predictive of the State as it will be in the future....hence the question: does the State ever really change, or does it merely re-vamp it's projected image periodically, in order to perpetrate such illusions as 'people power' and 'democracy'? Matthew Stadler's mastery of language and expert craftsmanship have produced a fascinating and insightful novel that is still haunting days after first being read - and one which will beg to be read again. Thought-provoking and unique, 'The Sex Offender' should not be missed.
Deliciously subversive
Review by Charlus, 2005-12-31
Surrealism has not made it to American literature, let alone to the American popular..."mind", thus to combine it with pædophilia takes a bit of breathtaking effrontery, especially in this age of evangelical lynch mobs. Said mobs are thus satirised not only IN the novel but as the author imagines them taking ON the novel: subversion both inside and outside the text. A delicious concept, almost as wicked as the Francophilia in Stadler's ALLAN STEIN.
Will Oprah make this one of her selections?
Dazed and Confused
Review by Anonymous, 1998-09-20
The Sex Offender by Matthew Stadler is a reading nightmare. When you think it's coming together and starting to make sense, everything goes astray. It peaks the imagination, but ultimately leaves you, like it's hero, overexcited and unable to perform. The writing is someimes beautiful and sometimes indulgent. It would be nice to be inside Matthew Stadler's brilliant mind and travel with him on this convoluted trip.
