From Celestial Reviews 15 - September 9, 1995

"The Amazing and Ponderous Adventures of Me and Martha Jane" by Santo J.
Romeo (73233.1411@compuserve.com).  This is a difficult story for me to
review.  What's there is excellent, but it's simply not all there.  The
story "ends" with these lines: "By that afternoon, when we started
straightening up for the return of my parents and her mother, both of us
were saying we probably wouldn't want to have another orgasm for months.
 Of course, we were both wrong about that."  This is simply not an ending.


The story is written from the perspective of the child narrator, who is
presumed to be a little over fifty years old and is telling a story about
his younger days.  A person writing from that perspective would know the
details of what came next and would be inclined to relate those details.
If you enjoy going to movies that give you an excellent buildup to a good
ending even if you know that the last reel of the movie is missing, then
you'll possibly enjoy this story.  Likewise, if you enjoy leaving a good
World Series baseball game at the beginning of the ninth inning with the
score tied, you'll probably like this story.  However, my feeling is that
the author has completely ruined a good story by choosing not to supply
the ending.

There are other circumstances under which open-endedness is valid and even
desirable.  For example, if this story would have been presented from the
perspective of a current 12-year-old whose future was as yet unknown, a
modified version of this ambiguous ending would make sense.

Note that I am not demanding a *happy* ending.  I just want an ending.
The author made me buy into the idea that he was telling a story "as best
as he could remember it," and I think reasonable readers would want to
hear the end of that story.

If I were willing to read this as part of a "neverending serial," would
give this a rating of 10.  However, I don't see the point in posting or
reading such stories. I personally refrain from reading most stories that
are labeled 1/?.  To me these suggest that the author doesn't know where
the story is going.  The author of seuch entries seems to saying, "I'm
going to write about sex until I can't think of anything else I want to
say."  I may get interested in the story and discover that the author has
lost interest.  Good authors of long stories know where their story is
going before they start posting it - even though they may fill in numerous
details and even make serious changes in the plot as it develops.  I felt
betrayed when I thought I was reading a complete story in this case, only
to find that it wasn't all there.

Having said that, I want to point out that what does exist of the story is
excellent.  My frustration arises completely out of having been set up to
expect a full story, and then to find out it wasn't there.  The following
is a review of what does exist.  In this review, I am going to act as if I
am reviewing a whole, non-truncated story - what I was expecting until I
encountered the utterly silly ending.

Martha Jane was a young woman who was nine years older than the child
narrator.  They lived next door to each other in a federal housing project
around 1950 and shared a common front porch.  At the beginning of their
relationship, the 6-year-old hero harbored a wonderful, non-sexual
admiration for the older girl; and she showed a reciprocal respect for
him.  The focus of the story is the maturation and fulfillment of this
relationship.

Although the early lines of this story hint of sexual activity, the first
several paragraphs are devoted to demonstrating that the protagonist of
the story was a precocious child - not a sexually precocious child, but a
run-of-the-mill precocious child.  This bit of trivia is important,
because it emphasizes that the hero of this story should be considered as
a whole person, not as a simple sex object.  In addition, the early
development of non-sexual aspects helps set this story in a truly rich and
interesting psychological and emotional environment.

Certainly there is moral ambiguity in the story.  For example, near the
beginning the mother tells the young boy that pregnant women get that way
by eating too many popsicles and that babies come from storks.  Shortly
thereafter, Martha Jane plays with his penis to give him a hard-on, while
giving him a biological explanation of the facts of life.  If I had a son,
I wouldn't try either of these approaches to sex education.  It's
interesting that normal society rejects Martha Jane's approach - to the
extent that Redbook and the Sunday supplements would never even consider
publishing an account like this without labeling Martha Jane a pervert;
but sitcoms routinely laugh about the mother's explanation.

I'm running the risk of preaching to the choir here: most readers of this
review are likely to be predisposed to want to like a story like this.  On
the other hand, large numbers of civilized readers outside a.s.s. would
react to this story as an example of perversion.  Most of us will counter
by describing these people as sexually repressed puritans.  And so forth.
I think we should be willing to simply admit but tolerate the moral
ambiguity of the story.  It's fiction and it's interesting.  There's
nothing perverse in setting aside our moral scruples and enjoying a good
story.  Millions of American high schoolers are required every year to
read Edgar Alan Poe's tale about a pervert who tears the heart out of an
old man and buries it under the floorboards in his house.  We practically
require these students to set aside moral scruples and to enjoy the beauty
of this atrocity.  I'm not recommending that we make "Martha Jane" part of
the sophomore curriculum; I simply think adult readers can set aside moral
reactions long enough to enjoy this story without taking a position that
it would be "better" if all children grew up this way.

When I myself was a young babysitter, I did not give head to any of the
children I cared for; and I would hope that my own daughters likewise
refrain from this practice.  The psychologists and counselors who
suggested to the narrator later in his life that this activity was
abnormal are quite likely right (although, again, these sages would simply
laugh about the goofy explanations of sexuality given by the mother and
other adults.).  It would be much better for little boys to receive
accurate answers from their own parents and for young babysitters to have
internalized a code of ethical conduct that enables them to understand
their own and their clients' emerging sexuality and to rule out genital
contact without resorting to primitive mythologies.  But that still
doesn't make this a bad story.  One of my own favorite novels is Betty
Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."  I would never raise my own children
the way those children grew up in that story, but it's still a good novel
(and an excellent movie).

Again, I'm probably preaching to the choir.  But someone is surely going
to label this story pedophilia.  There are legitimate gripes against some
pedophile stories; they essentially recommend the adoption of lifestyles
that would be destructive to children.  What we need to do is acknowledge
that some stories that describe genital activities with children have the
potential to be destructive - especially those that are simply unrealistic
or that promote the exploitation of children.  On the other hand, other
stories that describe genital activity with or among children are either
harmless or actually have the potential to lead to moral or emotional
growth among readers.  To take a sexually-related analogy, there are
numerous examples of books and movies about adults having affairs.  Some
of these are badly written or stupidly conceived and seem to have as their
only goal to degrade the value of marriage and other permanent
relationships.  On the other hand, many of these books and movies are well
conceived and have the overall effect of enabling us to understand human
emotions - and, indeed, marriage and other permanent relationships - more
perfectly.

Although the most important aspect of this story is the sexual
relationship between the narrator and Martha Jane, it's not really a sex
story.  Rather, it's a story about the emotional development of two young
people.  Only about a third of the lines in the story are devoted to their
sex lives.  The non-sex scenes are extremely realistic and vivid, giving
us information needed to understand the background and personalities of
the two main characters - at least this would be the case if the story
didn't lose its focus because of the absence of an ending.

Finally, there's a problem with the story's title.  Most readers will
refer to this story simply as "Martha Jane," but the complete title is
"The Amazing and Ponderous Adventures of Me and Martha Jane."  The author
seems to think that the word "ponderous" means "making one ponder"; but
this is not what the word means.  A ponderous story is one that is "heavy,
plodding, boring, or tedious."  Perhaps the author meant "ponderable."  I
would recommend a different title, because I don't think these adventures
are boring or tedious; and I don't think the author yet has the prestige
to redefine "ponderous."

I also recommend finishing this potentially excellent story.  I was so
befuddled by the lack of an ending that I e-mailed the author the night
before I posted this review, asking whether I was missing something.  He
replied that the story was complete as I had it, but that the story was
part of a larger work, and that an additional portion of that larger work
would be published as a sequel.  I believe that this author is a serious
writer who has a sensitive story to tell; but I don't see the point in
releasing the "story" in this way.  A story needs a focus.  This one has
lots of interesting details, but no focus.

If a reader wants a source of information about how much fun it would be
to have sex with a precocious little kid, this would be a good story for
that purpose - although all the details about the child's emotions would
probably be viewed as distracting.  I really don't think this was the
author's purpose.  On the other hand, if a person (like myself) is reading
this to obtain sensitive insights into the personalities of two young
people as they mature sexually and emotionally, I think a legitimate
reaction is to feel cheated.  I spent several hours reading this story
with the understanding that the narrator was going to tell me the story of
his relationship with Martha Jane.  I entered into a relationship of trust
with the author and learned to love Martha Jane and Speedy, and I became
really interested in what was happening to them.  At the end of Chapter 6
I learned that after a lengthy separation, they got together again when he
was 12 years old and had wonderful sex together.  Right before they did
so, Martha Jane bemoaned the fact that both of them "were going straight
to hell."  This sounds like a significant statement - it's a realistic
statement that she perceived the moral ambiguity of the situation.  (How
could something this wonderful be bad?  Well, one answer would be that
both of them would be incapable of dealing with other sexual partners.
The apparent beauty could lead realistically to a living hell.  I'm not
saying that's the ending - but the author presents this idea through the
heroine's own mouth.)  So then the story ends with a suggestion that
they're going to have a lot more orgasms together!?!?  Why is the author
doing this?  It comes across to me as the same sort of thing that authors
do when they can't figure out what to do and just have a truck run over
everybody, so that they don't have to bother finishing the story.

This story does not need a sequel; it needs one more focused chapter.
"Star Wars" had a sequel.  That means there was a story that ended and
then another story.  "Roots" had a sequel.  That original television
series had a focus and came to a conclusion; and since viewers wanted to
know more, the author and producers generated a sequel.  "Gone with the
Wind" even has a sequel.  But all those stories were stories in themselves
before they had sequels.  Authors and producers in the normal literary and
film worlds cannot get away with dumping a story in front of people and
saying, "Here. Look at this.  We may give you more if you beg for it
fervently enough."

I can only speculate about *why* this story doesn't have an ending.
Perhaps the story is solidly based in truth, and the whole truth would be
sad and make the beautiful sex that we see in this story appear to be
eventually destructive.  Perhaps the story got too complex and the author
couldn't handle it.  If this were a *bad* story with no ending, I would
not be upset.  However, this is an excellent story that becomes completely
destroyed by the absence of an ending.  (Rating: 5)