Stephanie Kallos’ 2015 novel Language Arts
The center of the story is Charles Marlow and his autistic son Cody, whose sudden withdrawal as a toddler precipitated the breakup of Charles’ marriage to Alison and triggered a long-dormant memory of Charles’ childhood friendship with a developmentally disabled classmate. Through staggered flashbacks and shifts in present-day scenes from Charles to Cody (living in a group home) and a nun suffering from dementia that has caused her to revert to her young adulthood in Italy – a few too many abrupt shifts for me – Kallos unfolds what is really the story of Charles overcoming a series of mental obstacles to find some way to connect to his son.
Whereas Kallos’ phrasings often detracted from the book, she avoided many obvious plot pitfalls that would have turned this into a Hallmark movie of the week. Charles wrote an award-winning story as a fourth grader that resurfaces when his elementary school is slated for demolition; at a reunion with other students from that Langauge Arts class, he meets up with one of the other prize students, who’s also divorced, and … nothing happens. It would have just been too easy to have them date, or sleep together, or fall in love and give Charles a well-rounded, happy ending, but Kallos doesn’t go there, just as she doesn’t give Cody a miraculous recovery or reunite Charles and Alison or choose any of a dozen other easy ways out. The cathartic climax of the book is of the small kind, and it feels genuine, the kind of tiny miracle that can happen any day through nothing more unlikely than the kindness of others.
There’s a hint of pop spirituality, a sort of false ecumenicalism, running through Language Arts that did ring a bit off-key for me; it’s certainly true that we see many people turning away from organized religion while retaining some kind of spiritual belief system, but here Kallos wants to ask the Big Questions without doing much more to address them than point out that we’re all looking for answers. Between that and the prose, I could never quite get over the disconnect between the intense, thorough characterizations and the feel that Kallos was talking down to the reader – not from a point of intelligence looking down on the less clever, but the way we might look at a self-help guru dispensing empty platitudes. I can forgive quite a bit for a story and cast this compelling, where the conclusion delivers in a huge way without diverting from the book’s relentless realism.
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This was the one hundredth book I’ve read in 2015, a peculiar goal but one I’ve wanted to reach for a very long time. I was on track to do it back in 2002, my first year working for the Blue Jays, one where I spent a lot of time on my own in Toronto (and prowled many of that fine, fine city’s many used bookstores … I remember a wonderful one near Little Italy where I went nuts), and read 75 books by early September. It was Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises that stopped me cold; I’ve tried so much Hemingway before and after that, but his prose is so cold and his depression so thoroughly reflected in his stories and characters that I’ve found his work more of a chore to read even than the labyrinthine language of Faulkner. That year I just hit a wall, and went as long without reading anything as I have at any point since then.
The year that my daughter was born (2006) was, naturally, another low point, although I still got to about 50-55 books read that year; I didn’t travel between spring training and the Futures Game, which cut down on reading time, and of course if I tried to read when my daughter was an infant I’d just fall asleep wherever I sat. But I’ve steadily ramped back up the last few years and read religiously for an hour or more just about every day. My therapist back in Arizona encouraged me to do it when I expressed some reservations about devoting time to such a solitary activity when I had a family and a job and, like everyone, a million other things I “should” (dangerous word there) be doing. She insisted I consider it part of my “self-care” regimen, the way I would meditation or exercise or getting enough sleep or eating well. So I have, going through 70 to 80 books a year most years since my daughter started sleeping through the night.
This year’s been an exceptional one though, even though I’ve had my share of longreads, because of my daughter. She’s supposed to read for a half an hour every night, so our deal, when I’m home, is that we read together, usually sitting next to each other on the couch (or her lying on top of me, which was a lot easier before she got to be more than half my weight), although if she’s annoyed at me for making her do her homework she might exile herself to the other side of the couch. She’s even been cheering me on towards the 100-book goal, which is wonderful encouragement, and delights me to see that she’s acquired some of my own yearning for achievements, no matter how arbitrary or meaningless to anyone but myself.
This year’s list of books has been suitably eclectic, with everything from Ngugi wa Thiongo’s epic Wizard of the Crow to Jasper Fforde’s two most recent Chronicles of Kazam books (which I read to my daughter a chapter or two a night), from books on quantum entanglement to the last two-thirds of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. The list included fourteen Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners and one for Non-Fiction; ten Hugo Award for Best Novel winners; and two titles from Nobel Prize for Literature winners. (I didn’t like either of those two.) Three books were collections of works from various authors; of the other 97, twenty-two were written by women. Eighty-seven of the titles were works of fiction. Eight were audiobooks to get me through the drives to and from Bristol or the occasional bout of yardwork. I read four titles each from Agatha Christie and Rex Stout; three by Waugh; and two apiece from Fforde, Neil Gaiman, Philip K. Dick, and P.G. Wodehouse. And one was by an author I know personally, a rare pleasure and a case where I didn’t bother to feign objectivity.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just begun John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar
