beautiful .. you’re going to be famous!” she shouts, oblivious to how cruelly her words are being contradicted by all Jeremy’s peers.

Jeremy is not oblivious, though. He flees the spotlight of politics for the anonymity of the school chorus, enjoying “being unable to hear my own voice: being part of a long song outside myself.” Soon, however, he finds himself humiliated, placed in the back row with a group of boys who are requested by the conductor only to mouth the words—to pretend to sing. He takes the suggestion and runs with it; he arms himself with a pencil and pad, learns sign language, and refuses thenceforth to talk. This continues until his father, a timid man with a tenuously situated psyche, wrestles him to the ground, shouting, “Why won’t you talk to us?” The first words out of Jeremy’s mouth, after such a long period of silence, are “I hate you. I hate all of you.”

It is fitting that this expression of anger is an outcome of an attempt to abolish forever the bothersome voice. Moreover, it is notable that this outburst is the most direct, honest, and verbalized expression of anger in the whole book. Elsewhere, Jeremy’s anger is swept away with defensive explanations, made farcical, or embodied in what he calls an “unusual” act—a violent action accompanied by a peculiarly muted description. Nothing is said of feelings, as if actions alone suffice to communicate feelings. This leaves the reader with a sense of Jeremy’s anger as being attenuated and suppressed, as if Jeremy, even as he tells his story, is unaware of the depth of what the sympathetic reader will realize is a rightful anger toward his overbearing mother, as if the meaning of his very name, Zorn, which in German means something akin to wrath—as in “the wrath of God”—is lost to him. Even as he is unconscious of the emblematic significance of his name, so he is unconscious of the anger that it emblemizes, an anger which, no doubt, is the cause of his “trepidant lips.”

Jeremy’s attempts at speech therapy do nothing to alleviate his stutter. His first try, with a school psychologist, gets her fired when Jeremy pretends to have swallowed the button she has placed on his tongue. At another school, the therapist leads Jeremy into a communicative dead end when she instructs him simply to avoid words that make him stutter and to distance himself from his speech acts—to place himself outside them—by treating them as recitals. The first suggestion leads Jeremy to pore over the thesaurus; as a result, his sentences become “so saturated with approximate verbal equivalents that what I thought often bore almost no relation to what I actually said.” The second stratagem leads to an even more ignominious end. Having been instructed by the therapist to act in a school play, Jeremy tries out for Othello and is assigned the minuscule part of the Sailor. On opening night, he makes it through his one line until the last word, the name Angelo, the “A” of which “suddenly stood like a capitahzed mountain barring entrance to the rest of the word, so I replaced ’Angelo’ with ’Gratiano.’” When the Duke says his next line—“How say you by this change?rdquo;—Jeremy thinks he is asking about the substitution of the names. Angered, he draws his sword. The First Senator’s next words, “This cannot be,/By no assay of reason,” convince Jeremy that they are now “outside the drama.” He attacks, the lights go out and the curtain comes down. Jeremy, in his attempt to get outside his bothersome voice, has succeeded only in failing outside the outside, where he ends, more decidedly than ever, trapped inside.

Jeremy starts playing basketball, has soon perfected his shot, and becomes the star of the junior high school team, though not for long. Apparently, even the natural workings of Jeremy’s body run with an obsessive energy: He gets acne, not a mere pimple here and there but “dense purple collections that finally burst with blood dilating welts that never went away, infected wounds that cut to the bone.” One day at the beach, having obsessively applied his unguents, he ends with boils “raised to the highest degree and glistening in a terrible blue hue.” He panics, jumps off a thirty-foot cliff, and ends with a broken leg and the realization that he will never play basketball again. He turns to writing.

The choice of vocation seems inevitable. Both of his parents are writers, and, more important, as Jeremy puts it, “the pressure that underlies stuttering also generates the ambition to succeed—to succeed hysterically and on the same field as the original failure: somewhere within the world of words.” Stuttering has also aged him in his relationship to language. For his entire life, he has struggled with what most take for granted. Thus, he has long recognized that “whether we stutter, stay silent, or break into declamation the point never quite gets across, the communication is never completed.” Language can only approximate reality, and thus it becomes a dead weight that buries a person’s “number one treasure” —closeness to others. Finally, Jeremy has decided that “only in broken speech is the form of disfluency consonant with the chaos of the world’s content. Stutterers are truth- tellers; everyone else is lying.”

He begins his writing career as editor of the high school newspaper. By the time he is a freshman at the University of California at Los Angeles, he is tired of journalism— “an anonymous arrangement of trivial facts,” as he explains it to his mother—and would prefer his writing to reflect himself. His mother is not impressed. “If you want to r-r-register your sensational uniqueness, go ahead and register,” she says with typical bluntness. Before he seriously begins writing, however, he detours into two other obsessions: Latin and the sophisticated methods of speech therapy offered by Sandra, a psychologist at the UCLA Speech and Hearing Clinic.

Latin represents for Jeremy his ideal self: “squared off militaristic, masculine, untouchable always silent.” This idealization is bruised when he is called upon to recite in class. Failing miserably, he retreats into the library, where he fiendishly studies, apparently hoping that mastery of syntax will magically give him mastery over his mouth. Naturally, he does not succeed and comes to realize that he cannot master even a dead language.

Sobered, he turns to Sandra, whose methods, ranging from breath control to voluntary stuttering, do little to alleviate his problem. Nevertheless, Jeremy gains in self-awareness. He neglects his studies and throws himself into the therapy. “Critical Theory was all right, as classes go, but in speech therapy a late entrance into the human equation was being studied.” His sporadic attempts at writing during this period generate only a few overwrought, maudlin stories: He cannot do anything well unless he does it obsessively, and his obsessions are typically set off by a shock or crisis. Thus, his obsession with guilt began with the breaking of his mother’s statue. Singing in the chorus began with the rejection of his bid for student body president, muteness with the rejection of his singing voice, journalism with his broken leg, speech therapy with his failure in the recitation of Latin. It takes the death of his mother by cancer to set him seriously to the task of writing. By the end of the story, the reader realizes that the book he has finished is a product of Jeremy’s obsessive nature—a long, rambling narrative, complete with Freudian misspellings and bad puns that no editor would allow. “I wanted an unalterable compass of my position, not this other, disgusting feeling, this childish apprehension that wherever I was I was hopelessly lost.” So Jeremy says near the beginning of his story; by the end, he has found that compass and located himself within his past, which, as his mother had liked to say, “is but prologue to the present.”