The Hampdenshire Wonder

"Victor Stott is a giant-headed "supernormal" child mutated - in the womb - by his parents' desire to have a son born without habits. After surveying science, philosophy, history, literature, religion, the best that has been thought and said, the Wonder is dismissive: "So elementary... inchoate... a disjunctive... patchwork." Young Victor's adult interlocutors are shattered by his statements about the nature of the universe and human progress; his philosophy begins with rejecting "the interposing and utterly false concepts of space and time," and ends with the notion that life and all matter are merely "a disease of the ether." Alas, his interlocutors are unable to live without illusions; they reject the Wonder's disenchanting insights"--