The guidance counselor

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Berkeley: The guidance counselor needs guidance. His Norwegian girlfriend is discontented; his ex-wife feels not dissimilar: while searching for spirit the counselor is bleeding from material parts best left unmentioned; his grandson has fallen in love with a girl unapproved-of by the family, as she is “Nice but black”—and he has fallen in love with that selfsame girl. For him the race problem is no problem. Age is. As is the astonishing fact that this poetically gifted girl, this incurable truth seeker, seems to like this oldie fellow back. In this novel of original sensibility we have a spiritual man in his own honest-quirky way, a conscientious and fiercely compassionate man who has tried to guide adolescents during the length of his working life, who now must fight being an adolescent chaser and becoming an adolescent then himself. The road to good intentions can be paved with hellish tars. Yes, this is peerlessly funny stuff, but its dilemmas scrape against life’s painful truths as well.