The Little Book
The Age
Saturday October 25, 2008
The Little Book
Selden Edwards Abacus, $32.99SELDEN EDWARDS IS a Californian headmaster who has tinkered with this debut novel for half a lifetime before someone eventually published it. Unfortunately, The Little Book should probably have stayed in the little top drawer. It's a weird time-travelling adventure in which hero Wheeler Burden, a rock legend from a Boston banking dynasty, finds himself inexplicably transported back to 1890s Vienna. There, he gets on his grandfather's bad side, runs into Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud, and falls in love with his own grandmother. When Wheeler's father shows up (a victim of the same temporal anomaly), he insists that they should do nothing to alter the future. But, inadvertently or otherwise, the time-travelling family seems to be behind every twist and turn of 20th-century history. The plot is like something out of John Irving, but Edwards' novel drips with such earnest infatuation with his own characters that you virtually have to wipe the author's saliva from the pages.
© 2008 The Age