Roy Clear, a young Californian almost fourteen years old, discovers pleasure... That is the main theme of this new novel by Roger Peyrefitte, which brings out the astonishing contrast between the moral freedom of the young and the conformism, or hypocrisy, of those around them.
We are in 1977-78. Roy, a boy from the highest social class, lives in Beverly Hills, the wealthiest area of Los Angeles - which is to say of the United States; and he is a student at the elegant high school there, having come up from the very chic Buckley school...
It is with men, boys, and one girl that he discovers pleasure - and indeed all the pleasures that most deviate from the orthodox. Sex, drugs, money, violence and religiosity (the famous Californian cults) mingle in these pages, just as they are indissolubly mingled in American life. A world both troubled and troubling, at times rendered more appalling by the magnificent Southern Californian setting.
Owing to the exactitude of its reports of public events, the book serves also as a contemporary chronicle, the accuracy of which will come as no surprise to Roger Peyrefitte's readers. And finally, they will find that the scarcely credible daring of many scenes will, because of the ages of the principal characters and the intensity of their school life, form a kind of counterpoise to his earlier book Les Amitiés Particulières (Special Friendships).
Roy is an example of erotic literature. But in spite of that it remains the book of a moralist, since it ends with the triumph of a certain moral attitude... "Peyrefitte writes in the way that Ingres drew", said Jane Albert Hesse. Never has the nimble grace of his pen been as necessary, and as admirable.
Nevertheless, those susceptible to shock are advised not to follow him into this terrain where, in order to portray a young Californian of to-day, he wished to avail himself of all the resources of an uncompromising liberty.

Roy

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