FICTION

THE SEX OFFENDER by Matthew Stadler (HarperCollins: $22; 206 pp.) A strange book; a story with layers of meanings, implications folded into interpretations wrapped around allusions. Or not, as the case may be. The title, at least, is straightforward enough, though “The Child Molester” would have been more accurate (but less attractive on a bookstore shelf). The protagonist begs to differ--literally begs. He admits to no offense, no molestation. What this teacher did with a 12-year-old boy named Dexter, he says, was the natural extension of a deep, almost divine love. Nonetheless, society frowns, and, affably enough, the good citizen agrees to a course of treatment. The setting is an industrial city by the sea. The time, we surmise, is the near future, in which the offender’s case falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Criminal and Health Systems. Treatments, most of them hair-of-the-dog, are varied, well-meaning and comically inappropriate--with risible nods to Kafka, Swift and Orwell. There are “boredom tapes,” aversion therapy, let’s-go-blindfolded-and-get-naked exercises, with progress registered by means of a sort of “phallometer.” Despite the best of intentions, the narrator (by now called “M. Uh-uh” to protect the guilty) remains abashed. Shock treatment turns him on; told to concentrate on an innocent Impressionist painting, he imagines that in a pond hidden by trees swims a nubile young stud. . . . Subscribing to the story-layer theory, fold No. 2 conceals a revolution, placid enough, against the government, a revolt whose inspiration derives from a 6-foot-6 drag queen with a celestial voice. Layer No. 3 concerns the Salon, where Mr. Uh-uh finds work. To the Salon flock government ministers, including the prime, for annual reconstruction of their faces in keeping with constituents’ demanding at least the image of leadership. Will Mr. Uh-uh be cured? Just who is wearing their PM’s face these days? Matthew Stadler tells all in an outrageous but admittedly fascinating tale with a moral. Or two.