Bruce Pike (Pikelet)

Bruce Pike is a middle-aged divorcee looking back on his formative years (when he went by the diminutive nickname, Pikelet). He is thus both narrator and protagonist, and we get to know him over the course of the novel from what he tells us, but also from how he tells it.

Alternately self-effacing and opinionated, he takes a defensive tone at times – prefacing his memories by insisting that he is “not a nostalgic man,” and has no wish “to join anybody’s misery club, to be adopted as a fellow victim of whatever syndrome is doing the rounds this week” (18). He characterizes himself as a “lone child” who was independent rather than timid: despite enjoying outdoor pursuits, he “avoided teams of any kind and the prospect of organized sport was a misery” (11 – 12). It is worth questioning the extent to which he develops as a character, since...