Book Review: The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear

Title: The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear

Author: Kin Platt

Date: 1968

Publisher: Chilton / Dell

ISBN: none

Length: 247 pages

Quote: "Now if my name were Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, or Nikolai Andreevich Rimski-Korsakov, or Maximilien Francois Marie Isidore de Robespierre--I could possibly understand your having a little difficulty pronouncing it...But Rawling is such a simple name. Don't you think?...Hardly that funny, Miss Wide-in-the-Beam."

Trigger alert: this is a story about child abuse--not sexual abuse, but the emotional and physical kind.

Partial spoiler alert: Kin Platt became famous for writing trivial mystery-adventure stories; he also wrote some mysteries aimed at children that were funny and informative, and then he also wrote this psychological study, which was also marketed to children. I read it in grade eight and thought it was well done. Rereading it as an adult, I still think it's well done. Excellently done. So well done that, although it works as a story for junior high school students, I think it may have been intended for adults. To explain why, in this review, I have to discuss the denouement, although I won't say a word about the climax of the story.

The concept of child abuse--as distinct from simply physical "cruelty"--was new in the 1960s. Roger Baxter is a poster boy for all the different kinds, except, so far as the story explicitly mentions, sexual abuse. In the quote above, Mr. Rawlings is self-identifying as one of those teachers who thought verbal abuse, humiliating junior high school kids before their peers, was a good teaching technique. There were many of them in real life; they weren't perceived as abusers, they often acquired tenure, and some of them didn't retire until the 1990s.

Then there are the therapists, who help Baxter in some ways, but may at times be making things worse by embarrassing him--or by stirring up memories; Baxter burned his tongue, as a much younger child, on a styptic pencil, so when the speech therapist tries to guide his tongue with a little white stick, he panics. Platt dedicated this book to a therapist friend and presents the therapists, especially “bulldog-like” Miss Clemm, as if he were consciously trying not to make them seem like idealized images of his friend. Miss Clemm does a lot for Baxter but she's not heroic, or even pretty—a very ordinary kind decent woman, worth a hundred of Baxter's glitzy mother, and nothing more.

Both of Baxter's parents are abusers. His mother spends more time with him and thus has abused him more than his father. His father is distant, hostile, and uncommunicative; his mother is a real sadist. Nevertheless, when they divorce, his mother gets custody of him and moves him from Southern California to New York City. In one way this is good for Baxter: he has some sort of mental block about pronouncing the R sound in English, and although some of his teachers are snarky about it, in NYC dialect the R sound is almost optional. Almost. In situations where he can give his name as "Bax-ta" he's cool, but he hates people hearing him stammer, reluctantly, "Wa-ja."

(In 1968 dictionaries mentioned that the traditional English pet form of Roger was "Hodge"...too bad people like the older Baxters didn't bother to look up that sort of thing. Probably they didn't own a full-sized dictionary.)

In other ways, too, New York turns out to be a good place for Baxter. His mother rents a flat in a building where Baxter meets a beautiful model, who finds him amusing, and her friend, Roger Tunnell, a member of the Greatest Generation who teaches him how to say "Roger" with a French R sound, which Baxter can make. Reflecting on a violent incident he's witnessed, Baxter thinks the gang wouldn't dare mess with his mother's new man, "the bullfighter," presumably as cruel as his mother is, and not with Tunnell, who is kind, either, "not if they wanted to live." Later, when the various abuses in Baxter's life reach a crisis, Tunnell comes to help...though how much a male "stranger" can help Baxter, we're not told.

Baxter is not a good student, and he seems very young for his age, but he shows more empathy than the average twelve-year-old boy. Abuse itself doesn't necessarily produce empathy--it can produce sociopathic cruelty--but abused children do learn, much earlier than healthier, happier children, to "read" other people's nonverbal displays of emotion, which can help them recognize impending violent rage and get away from the abuser. Empathy and compassion usually appear around the time of puberty, which Baxter seems to be barely approaching, and Platt shows us that his higher than usual sensitivity to other people's pain is not accompanied by any special sensitivity to their other moods. In psychological terms, Baxter's precocious sensitivity is not true spiritual compassion; it's a Freudian coping mechanism, his projection of his own pain onto others.

In real life, people like Baxter can seem very kind as long as they believe others are suffering, then turn resentful, neglectful, or even abusive when the others seem to be less miserable. They may be drawn to social work, where they empathize endlessly with the whines of callous welfare cheats who learn how to milk their sympathy, but show no empathy whatsoever toward people who intend to get back on their financial feet. Others become the kind of elementary school teachers who ooze empathy toward slow learners, but project onto fast learners the emotions they used to feel for school bullies and abusive teachers. Some are drawn to "charity"--like Lillian Reardon in Atlas Shrugged. They are horrible, because their coping mechanism looks so nice that people, including themselves, fail to spot the hostility barely covered by their thin layer of selective compassion. They feel others' pain—and they batten on it. They're the kind who've given us a system for “helping” homeless people and gutter drunks that leaves no room for helping people keep their homes or stay sober.

Baxter is by no means the worst-case type of victim of child abuse--that'd be the child who accepts the idea that might is right and starts right in abusing the first child he finds who's smaller than himself. But although Platt shows us Baxter's pathological empathy in very lifelike, memorable images--Baxter tries to save a fawn from a wildfire in California, gives money to a beggar because he's been unable to save the victim of a gang beating in New York--it'd be a mistake to think that Baxter is really going to become a kind person, much less that abuse is going to make him more kind. If he'd been a real boy, by now he might have become a kind man, or an ooey-gooey social worker--or a true schizophrenic. In 1968 there was no way to predict which.

At the end of the story, Baxter is still in wide-open howling need of examples of real compassion as practiced by real men. In high school I accepted The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear as a much better than average specimen of the Story Written to Educate Teenagers About the Problems Other People May Have, and as that it works...but as an adult, rereading, I think it's a Story Written to Persuade Adults.

We don't know who's going to get custody of Baxter when he leaves the hospital. We know that, if Baxter is going to grow up to be really kind rather than pathologically ooey-gooey, it had better be Tunnell; we also know that, if Baxter's father wanted to demand custody, even now no state would let Baxter stay with Tunnell, and in 1968 few states would have considered a single man's application for custody of a Troubled Teen on the sole grounds that, as Tunnell explains their relationship in the hospital, "we were in love with the same girl." The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear just may have been a propaganda piece written for adults, but rendered dismissable by its having been marketed to children...

As a propaganda piece for adults, or as a teaching story for teenagers, I think this book is as valuable as it was forty years ago. Others apparently agree because it's gone into collector prices. If you don't specify which edition you prefer you're likely to get the durable library-bound hardcover, likely a library discard, because on Amazon those are selling for less than the cheap pocket-size paperback (shown above). What I have in real life is the pocket-size paperback; in real life I'd accept less than the $16.59 for which pocket-size paperback copies start on Amazon.

To buy it online, send $15 per book, $5 per package (two books the size of the hardcover edition per package, and there'd be room for one or two more books if they're thinner), and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address. (Salolianigodagewi is the e-mail sorter, from which you will receive the correct Paypal address for what you order when you order it.)