“It was possible to hear a wide range of commotion coming off the meadow in waves: the din of the newly arrived campers—and what a peculiar din at that, the heavy grunts and human squealing, the many slurred and off-timbre voices, the disorder of it all—and beneath these sounds the thud of luggage on the meadow grass and the wet clicks of the cooling bus engines. Soon there were footsteps, a small regiment of them, crunching across the gravel pathway toward the infirmary.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose  (SEP 21, 2011)

The dictionary defines “inverted” as reversed, upturned, and this aptly describes the goings on, again and again in John Dalton’s latest novel, The Inverted Forest, an impressive follow-up to his award winning debut, Heaven Lake. That the two stories are quite diverse in setting and subject serves the reader well, as Heaven Lake, set in Taiwan and China, was one of those wondrous, luminous novels difficult to surpass. The Inverted Forest takes place in 1996 in a rural Missouri summer camp, a sun-dappled, bucolic environment that still manages to impart a sense of subliminal unease.

A grand transgression has just occurred: the counselors-in-training have indulged in an illicit, late-night skinny dipping pool party, to the outrage of conservative-minded camp owner Schuller Kindermann, who fires them all the next day, leaving his staff to scramble for new counselors before the first campers arrive. New counselors are hired, but no time is left to prepare them, inform them, and thus when the first campers arrive, a mere hour behind the counselors, they are stunned to see not kids spilling out of the bus, but adults, severely mentally disabled adults. The disorienting, funhouse sense of inversion has begun.

Among the camp staff are lifeguard Christopher Waterhouse, winsome and personable, Harriet Foster, camp nurse, the first African-American Schuller has ever hired, and twenty-three year old Wyatt Huddy. Born with Apert syndrome, which causes the skull bones fuse together too early, giving the face a distorted appearance, Wyatt has suffered the lifelong burden of looking much like the disabled state hospital campers, but without the intellectual disability. His presence produces confusion and discomfort in people he encounters and never more so while working as a counselor for the state hospital campers.

Dalton is one of those writers, like Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout, who has a fluid, assured style that’s compulsively readable, instantly absorbing. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dalton was the winner of the Barnes & Noble 2004 Discover Award and currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He knows his craft, and every character who narrates arrives fully fleshed out with a rich backstory that has been distilled into a paragraph or two, usually with a dollop of wry philosophy tossed in. Countless examples exist throughout the story; I’d love nothing more than to quote a half-dozen, but I’ll restrain myself and limit it to a few, like seventy-eight year old Schuller Kindermann, lifelong bachelor, who craves order and prefers to be left alone to work on his hobby, crafting kirigami-style foldout paper creations.

“In his later years he’d come to understand a particular irony at work in the world: what you lack will always be magnified by the people and events that constitute your life. A boy with no appreciation for food will be born into a family of cooks and live above a bakery. A woman who feels no kindness for her children will see, everywhere she goes, mothers and fathers fawning over their babies. So it was with him. He’d gravitated to a career as a summer camp director. All his life he’d been exasperated by other people’s unwise longings.”

And unwise longings, it becomes clear, constitute a great deal of the challenges within the camp during the state hospital patients’ two weeks there. Desires abound, not simply among the young, attractive counselors, but among the severely disabled as well. Dalton, who’s had personal experience as a camp counselor under such circumstances, neither trivializes nor sentimentalizes the behavior of the disabled campers, but instead gives us a candid, clear view.

“And yet there was something outlandish about these state hospital campers. How had the women managed to grow fat in such striking ways? Not just bottom-heavy but with sudden shelflike ridges of fat that jutted out from their hips. They had either no breasts to speak of or hard-looking, conical breasts that looked too high-set and pointy to be real. With the men it was most often the opposite problem: a remarkable thinness, gangly arms, concave chests. A comic gauntness. You saw them from a medium distance and thought of old cartoons, the slouching, cross-eyed idiots with their awful haircuts and shortened trousers, their mouths full of sprawling teeth. But up close you noticed how each man or woman had gone inward and found a perch—unsteady maybe, or tilted, but still a perch—from which to peer out past the spasms and tics and whatever odd shapes their bodies had grown into.”

The story is narrated in turns, initially by Wyatt, Schuller and camp nurse Harriet, a canny, intelligent, single mother. It is she who observes the trouble brewing beneath the surface, problems that arise from the convergence of undertrained, overworked staff and the disabled campers that vastly outnumber them. Harriet’s suspicions over a staff member’s intentions come to a head one night and she enlists help from Wyatt to prevent a crisis, which results in an even greater crisis that carries long-term consequences for all involved.

Fifteen years later the story is inverted. The night’s drama, now history, gets turned on its side and explored from different perspectives. The past lives on in the heart of Marcy Bittman, former lifeguard, a character who allows herself to grow maudlin and sentimentalize. I found this was a brilliant way to add heart and sentiment to a section of the story without too much spilling over to the rest, which might have leached it of its taut hold on the reader. Former counselor Wayne Kesterton also returns, musing about a life that hadn’t turned out quite as he’d planned, the plight of many a dreamy twenty-year old. One afternoon on a city bus, Wayne encounters one of his former campers, the bad-tempered, vitriolic Mr. Stottlemeir, who loved nothing more than to spew obscenities at Wayne that summer (“Don’t touch me, you stinking puddle of piss! God damn you to hell eternal. God damn you, I say.”). This man, however, appears relatively normal. Through further investigation Wayne learns it was indeed his former charge, who’d finally been dosed with the right medication after years of trial and error, allowed to move from a locked-in facility to a retirement home. The unsettling nature of it hits both Wayne and the reader. What constitutes mental disability in the end? The wrong drugs? A low IQ? How low is too low? Should actions triggered by the baser, darker impulses that arise in all of us be judged by how intelligent we are?

Original and compulsively readable, The Inverted Forest challenges the reader to ponder the thorny issues of affliction, loyalty and desire. It’s one of those stories that will keep you thinking long after you’ve read the last page. A highly recommended read, a worthy follow-up to Dalton’s first novel, the equally recommended Heaven Lake.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Dalton
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Story of a Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

Bibliography:

• Heaven Lake (2004)
• The Inverted Forest (July 2011)

“Martha could feel Lynnie’s breath warming her neck. She braced herself for the one word Lynnie knew, the one Martha had already heard. The one that meant defiance.

‘Hide,’ came Lynnie’s whisper.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman AUG 28, 2011)

A generation ago, Geraldo Rivera shocked the nation by exposing the horrendous living conditions at the infamous Willowbrook School — a state-supported institution for children with mental retardation. Now, Rachel Simon creates a fictional rendition of this heartbreaking subject of vulnerable individuals locked in institutions out of sight of society.

Merging the elements of a love story, social commentary, and suspense narrative, The Story of Beautiful Girl focuses on two unlikely lovers. Lynnie Goldberg is a beautiful, mentally challenged, resident at the notorious Pennsylvania State School for the Incurable and Feebleminded…and Number 42 – aka Homan – a deaf black man who is her one true friend.

In dramatic fashion, we meet these mismatched lovers on a stormy night, immediately following their escape from the institution. They seek refuge at the remote home of Martha Zimmer, a retired and widowed teacher who is living her days in self-imposed exile. In a short time span, a secret is unveiled: Lynnie has just given birth to a little girl whom she desperately wants to hide from the authorities.

Eventually – and we learn this quickly – Lynnie is apprehended and sent back to the filthy and corrupt institution, while Homan escapes. Before being whisked away, Lynnie’s last words to Martha are, “Hide her.” In the meantime, Martha has prevailed on former students to provide shelter for the baby – named Julia – and herself.

From here, the plot unfolds with heart-wrenching moments as Lynnie yearns for Homan’s return and he wonders whether he will ever set eyes on the Beautiful Girl again. The plot twists address age-old questions that are typical of this genre: will Lynnie and Homan eventually get back together? Will they ever reunite with baby Julia and will she ever know the truth of her identity? The three characters follow different growth paths: Martha blossoms and finds meaning in her embracing of accidental motherhood, Lynnie moves forward from a frightened young woman to one who is able to exhibit extraordinary acts of courage, and Homan demonstrates his tenacity in the face of challenge. As their lives continue in parallel, they are all nurtured by their memories of their stolen time and their dreams for their daughter.

The story plays out over four decades – starting in 1968 — and encompasses issues that must be all too familiar with those in the field: the dehumanizing conditions that residents find themselves in, the value of dedicated professionals who defy the system, the budding of romance an self-expression even in the worst of conditions. Informed by her personal experience with her own sister, Rachel Simon expresses empathy for the plight of Lynnie and Homan and those who have been shuffled away into uncaring institutions by an ignorant society.

The Story of a Beautiful Girl raises important questions: how does society deal with those they regard as “feeble-minded?” How do we really deal with those whose challenges do not mirror our own? That is not to say that this book is without its flaws. Some of the plot twists defy belief. For example, it is hard to envision a slender girl who is able to hide her pregnancy for nine months while under near-constant surveillance. The thought processes attributed to Lynnie and Homan don’t always merge with the characters they are meant to be. And, in many cases, I felt that the writing style straddled that fine line between adult and YA fiction.

Still, I commend the author for her accomplishment. With just a little bit of research, I discovered there are still 162 state institutions that house an average daily population of over 33,000 people, most with inadequate funding. Just days before I read The Story of a Beautiful Girl, there was an expose on the front page of the Sunday New York Times about a resident who died after repeated abuse. Based on its newsworthiness and unique love story, I suspect this book will continue to garner its share of enthusiastic fans.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 260 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grand Central Publishing; 1 edition (May 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rachel Simon
EXTRAS:	Book website and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: One More Theory About Happiness by Paul Guest Lowboy by John Wray

Bibliography:

• Little Nightmares, Dreams : Stories (1990
• The Magic Touch (1994)
• The Story of a Beautiful Girl (2010)

Nonfiction:

• The Writer’s Survival Guide (1997)
• Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey (2002)
• Building a Home with my Husband: a Journey Through the Renovation of Love (2009)