Thunder on the left

by Christopher Morley

"If there were only one moonshiny night in each century, men would never be done talking of it. Old lying books would be consulted; in padded club chairs grizzled gentry whose grandfathers had witnessed it would prate of that milky perversion that once diluted the unmixed absolute of night. And those who had no vested gossip in the matter would proclaim it unlikely to recur, or impossible to have happened." Morley's novel is full of similar wonderful passages. It is also, metaphorically, the story of such a moonshiny night when Martin, the little boy who wanted to spy on adults to see if they were happy, appears as a boy in an adult's body. Things ensue at a leisurely (perhaps a little too leisurely) pace. While the writing at times is quite funny, the novel itself is full of sad whimsy. The novel asks, "What do we do to ourselves as we grow up?" Morley's novel, first published in the 1920's, is a wonderful book.