THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507060453
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MARK MOBLEY
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
ALL-AMERICAN BOY
A Memoir
SCOTT PECK
Scribner. 235 pp. $23.
YOU REMEMBER Scott Peck. But you don't know him, and you should.
Peck was - is - the gay son of a Marine colonel who testified in favor of the military ban on homosexuals. Nowadays, that's enough to get you a couple of hundred thousand dollars to sit with an author, an invitation to the ``Today'' show and a miniseries on Fox.
But when fame came to Peck, it found a writer. His memoir, All-American Boy, has passages of artful observation and beautiful phrasing. Only the occasional bit of overwriting, a structural miscalculation and a final lack of candor make his story less sweeping than it deserves to be.
Peck's life would be remarkable even if he had never appeared on ``Nightline.'' Before he came out, he was a fundamentalist Christian who had attended Bible college and spoken in tongues. Like so many young men before him, he wanted to be different from the way he had been made. He prayed to God and beseeched his body to lust for women, and when neither worked he ate a bottle of sleeping pills.
He also endured great sadness through the unfortunate life of his late mother. As an illegitimate child of an Annapolis cadet and a local girl, Peck was the source of whispers long before he knew he was gay. His parents separated when he was young. His mother's subsequent relationships included a marriage to a construction worker who beat her mercilessly. After a variety of religious experiences that mirrored her son's, she died of lymphatic cancer, hopeful fellow Christians witnessing at her bedside while she occasionally made faces behind their backs.
During the ins and outs of her relationships, Peck spent a great deal of time with his maternal grandparents. His grandmother was a forbidding Calvinist, the type of parent who deals with suspicions about her grandson's homosexuality by taping Jerry Falwell tracts to his door. Theology was dinner conversation.
Peck has the vivid memories and dark humor that some gay people acquire growing up in hostile environments. You could laugh or cry at the image of his mother horrified by having gay neighbors and screeching to a woman next door, ``Evelyn, come quickly! The homosexuals! The homosexuals!''
Peck makes the mundane details almost as memorable as his horror stories. He describes life with his mother and stepfather this way: ``She talked to him about her day, about church, about her trip to the supermarket, back and forth, as if anyone were listening, while Rodney picked his teeth and watched `Three's Company,' his face sunburned from a day of hanging drywall on the construction site, his expression something short of disinterest, more vacant, absent. Gone.''
But then Peck adds: ``We lived like nervous little primates around him.'' Which, strictly speaking, they were. It's the kind of clumsy image that appears too often in the narrative.
The oddest aspect of the book is the story line Peck chooses at the outset. He opens with the most brutal portion of his mother's life, a scene of her being assaulted by her second husband. It is a shocking start, but not the wellspring for this particular book.
Peck's fame comes from his relationship with his father, whom he didn't know until becoming a teenager and rarely lived with after that. There is surprisingly little material about the conflict that brought Peck to national attention. It almost seems too soon for Peck to be telling this part of his story.
And there are bitter notes throughout the book that seem contrary to Peck's essential nature. Like other gay men who have grown up amid intolerance, Peck is a tougher man than he might have been in different circumstances. And that's the saddest revelation of the book. MEMO: Mark Mobley is a staff writer. by CNB