“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)

“This Wednesday has been building to since seven this morning, Jacqueline thinks, since Sylvie was first born.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (SEP 6, 2010)

From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and just recently, Jennifer Vanderbes’ Strangers at the Feast, unhappy families have been a staple of literature all over the globe. What, or who, put the “y” in unhappy, in dysfunction? Canadian author Lee Kvern mines this question with a brutally honest sensitivity in her intimate family portrait of Lloyd and Jacqueline Burrows and their three children–“four, if you count Sylvie.”

In short, enigmatic, alternating chapters, over three decisive Wednesdays in three successive decades, the story of the Burrows family is teased out with measured restraint from its blistering beginnings to its nuanced conclusion. Three days of narratives gradually unite–Jacqueline in 1961, Lloyd in 1973, and Lesa, their oldest daughter, in 1987–and the years between them melt away and form a cohesive, lucent whole.

In the punishing prairie landscape of Red Deer, in Calgary, Jacqueline Burrows lives with her philandering husband, Lloyd, and their three small children, in a small and indistinct row house next to other RCMP wives, aka “the abandoned wives.” Lloyd is on the night shift of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and is rarely home. In 1961, Jacqueline is pregnant and exhausted, her maternal eyes on Lesa, Nate, and Sylvie, as they frolic bantam through the street. A devoted and sensible mother, she nevertheless relies on five-year-old Lesa as her bulwark to keep Sylvie close.

Sylvie was born asphyxiated, the cord wrapped around her neck. She was left with severe mental challenges and suffers from grand mal seizures. Jacqueline loves her fiercely but is overcome with guilt.

On this hot July Wednesday, Jacqueline sees Sylvie (from the kitchen window) start to climb in a strange man’s car. She intervenes and saves her with a scream, blames Lesa for failing to protect her, and subsequently chides herself. To make matters worse, the RCMP can’t find her husband when she calls for help.

“She thinks about her husband…in the arms, the bed of some other woman. Another other. And…while she no longer wants her husband–whether by God or by the sheer luminosity of their children, she needs him. The two are twisted up like electrical wires, complicated and live.”

Flash forward to February, 1973, and Corporal Lloyd’s narrative. His shift has ended, but he is embroiled in rescuing Jimmy Widman, the town drunk, who has been beaten senselessly and left frozen in the snow. Jimmy has had countless drunk-and-disorderly troubles, and no authority wants to help him anymore. But the taciturn corporal overextends himself and risks his job to help him.

Ironically, Lloyd recoils from home life and is often absent during family crises. Early in the marriage, he was Dudley-Do-Right to Jacqueline’s Nell, but the moniker has faded along with his vows; the matter of Sylvie has eroded his love.

“He sits in his cruiser, motor idling, glances down Main Street–his street, his town…farmers, ranchers, one doctor, one vet…one drive-in theater…one wife, three–no, four children, if he counts Sylvie, but he seldom does. The cruel, imperfect line across her small lips, her dark eyes glimmering like Lloyd’s, like the blonde’s in the bar last night…”

The connection of Jimmy’s destiny to the Burrows’ fate is disclosed through the drama of his story. Lloyd hauls a bundled-up Widman through hoops in a cat-and mouse chase to save Widman’s life and perhaps his own soul.

Lesa’s Wednesday of 1987 begins with a plane ride home to visit her mother in Red Deer. She’s a wreck, an adolescent at thirty-one. She flirts shamelessly but silently with a stranger at the airport, hoping to–she doesn’t know what. Her live-in boyfriend is home in Vancouver, but she’s terrified of emotional intimacy. She has dyed her firebrand red hair to the inky black of Sylvie’s, her agenda unknown.

Moreover, she is parading around in a super-hero costume with spiked pleather boots and a tawdry wig. (Her excuse–it is almost Halloween) Her brother, Nate, doesn’t recognize her at the baggage claim. When they get to Red Deer, her courage takes a flying leap. She deposits Nate at Jacqueline’s door and goes on an adventure in her Storm costume and cape that is poised to either sabotage or awaken her life.

“She wishes she were a kid again. That brief period of time when no matter what, all is forgiven; everything slips away like silk to skin, smoke to air, a magician’s trick performed by her mother…She knows the trick of the dysfunctional family all too well in that it leaves you lacking, looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

This isn’t a sentimental story about caring for Sylvie, a child with special needs. It is about a family’s catalyst to a long, uncertain truth. Sylvie, at age four, was that catalyst, on a particular thorny day when Murphy’s Law and Wednesdays became destiny. In elegiac and spare prose, Kvern brings the reader from the oblique to the sublime, from the edges of the family to the heart of the matter…of Sylvie.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Brindle & Glass; 1st edition (September 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lee Kvern
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Bibliography:

• Afterall (2001)
• The Matter of Sylvie (September 2010)

“Trevor, you’re performing in a bizarre little theatre of the absurd. You’re play-acting and the script is destined to get weirder. And the Director is going to ask you to do something to make the play’s dramatic purpose clear. Something ritualistic and sacrificial. Something strange yet familiar, just as the lights are slowly dimming….”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 4, 2010)

Trevor is a young Irishman in New York City. A film-school dropout with a checkered past, he is also a born storyteller whose life, both past and present, plays out in short takes of absurdity, abandonment, and aggression, with brief moments of wonder and wisdom thrown in — not an atypical first-time reaction to Manhattan. Voices speak to him in the soundtrack tones of James Mason or Bob Hoskins as he picks up the outtakes of his life from the cutting-room floor. And in calling him a born storyteller, I should also mention that he is one of the most unreliable narrators one is likely to encounter; most of the book will be spent distinguishing the truth from the falsehoods. As he himself admits: “We lie to protect. We lie to inure. To keep on going we have to lie.”

Trevor answers an ad for a companion to a young man with muscular dystrophy. The setting, a luxury Madison Avenue apartment, might come straight out of an Albee play. The young man, Ed, has his own suite, lined with sound equipment and well provided with CDs, LPs, videos, and porno magazines. His father, a retired judge, is holed up in his study; his grossly obese mother has not got out of bed for ten years, and the three communicate only by internal phones; only the cheerful pot-smoking cook Ellie is the least bit normal. For the most part, though, Lorcan Roche does not milk this situation for laughs, but as the background to tragedy. I was not surprised to read that he has worked as a male nurse himself, for these parts of the book have an undeniable authenticity. Trevor gets the job because he has the physical strength, an upbeat personality, and apparently some previous experience at a handicapped center in Dublin. The kindness and patience he shows with Ed, even when the boy behaves like a spoiled brat, is Trevor’s most attractive quality. But Roche does not stint on the physical details of the bathing, the snot-wiping, or the bedpans, and he leaves us under no illusions about the frustration and sheer hatred that even the most devoted care-giver can feel at times.

I have to admit that I had a hard time getting into the book at first. Trevor’s voice, though abundantly alive, is not quite as fresh and original as the cover blurb promises, and the relentless profanity took a bit of getting used to. The cover also promises that the book is “truly wickedly funny.” It is not. Despite the comic tone throughout, there is little to laugh at; instead one wonders what all this relentless jocularity is hiding. Fortunately, as the book proceeds, we begin to find out, as we learn more about Trevor’s past, his academic father, his snotty sisters, and his close connection with his actress mother, nursing her devotedly until her death. There is one scene where he talks with a priest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which serves as a touchstone of seriousness, in which Trevor truly reveals something of his soul. As it happens, he disavows much of this later; indeed the whole middle part of the book lurches about like a subway car rather than moving smoothly forward. But even those few glimpses of the real Trevor give one something to hold on to as the book staggers towards an ending that may shock some readers, but nonetheless seems absolutely right.

Let me end this somewhat mixed review with a detail that shows the book at its best. This is Trevor in Central Park on his day off: “I will watch as a distracted father releases an expensive model boat on sluggish pond water. I will wait in the shade for wind to blow slow understanding towards his overweight child who knows now the boat wasn’t bought for him.” Simply, even elegantly, written, this holds a sadness that reflects on the tragedy both in Ed’s life and in his own. Once Lorcan Roche learns to put more trust in writing like this, as opposed to his self-imposed role as an Irish comedian, he will become a novelist truly worth watching. Fortunately even the madcap ride of his first outing leads to some marvelous moments of stillness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (June 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	An article about Lorcan Roche and his family
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Europa Editons: A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous

Bibliography:

• The Companion (June 2010)

“It was terrifying to no longer be a patient. To no longer be in rehabilitation. In recovery. Unspoken, but quietly feared, was the assessment, by doctors, by nurses, and therapists, that you had reached an endpoint in this process. That your rehabilitation had come to its expiration date. That nothing more could be done. What awaited was the rest of your life.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (MAY 7, 2010)

This gripping memoir is an homage to resiliency, strength and courage. It is written by Paul Guest, now 27, who had a cataclysmic accident when he was 12-years-old. While riding his teacher’s old 10-speed bicycle, which had no brakes, he crashed and broke his neck. Since that day he has been confined to a wheelchair, a quadriplegic.

Paul is a poet and this book is written in a straight-forward, no-nonsense manner. The memoirs’s themes are tough and some of the book is painfully difficult to read. However, he is at no time maudlin and the poetics of his words cry out from the page. This is a man who knows his vocation, who was born to write. “The first poem I ever wrote came to me like an accident of the mind. A blip, noise that had no apparrent cause.” Paul was “thinking of nothing particularly literary, watching the sky and the visible world happen outside the window, when he began to hear in his head the rhythms of language, the propulsive patterns of a poem, and though he had no idea why, it was suddenly imperative that he write it down.” “There was no doubt, none, that he had stumbled on to something essential about himself, who he was and who he might become, and all around him the future seemed to crackle like a storm. This is what I am supposed to do, he thought. After that moment, he never doubted it.”

Paul’s journey to self-discovery begins when he is twelve years old. He is graduating from sixth grade and is invited over to his favorite teacher’s house. She gives him a reading test which he is able to ace from beginning to end. He is in the gifted program and is obviously verbally gifted well beyond his years. His teacher loans him a very old bicycle, so old that it is covered with cobwebs. Paul knows the brakes don’t work but figures he can steer the bicycle to safety when the time comes. However, when the time comes, Paul lands in a drainage ditch with the third and fourth vertebrae of of his neck broken. The treatment he received at the time of the accident was not state of the art and may even have made his situation worse.

He spends months in an Atlanta rehabilitation facility undergoing extensive and painful therapies and surgeries. He is able to remain in rehab until he reaches the point where they feel that he will no longer make any improvement. This comes sooner than Paul would like. He is released to his home where his wheel chair is too wide to fit into the bathroom and he has to be carried by his mother. His pride is in shambles. He lies naked a lot of times for washings, examinations, changing of urine bags, etc. Though his family is tender with him, Paul feels remote and “other.” In the rehab center he felt like one of the others, as though he fit in. “Disability isn’t so much about the loss of control as it is about the transferral of it. From yourself to someone else, to loved ones, strangers. To devices.”

Paul begins to regain some sensation in his body, most at chest level or above. These sensations don’t improve his movement or control over his body. However, some of these sensations are very painful and he also suffers from very painful leg spasms, especially at night. He talks candidly about his fears. “You enter this place. And you wait. For your body, for your nervous system, for the manifold nerves which comprise it, to do something, to do anything, for your faithless skin to pebble with gooseflesh in a draft of cold air, for one muscle out of the six hundred gone slack to convulse back to life, for the most desperate fears within you to recede. And whatever it is you fear, and all of it is elemental, whether you’ll walk again or dress yourself or eat without help, make love, all these fears are not assuaged by your time here. Those fears are systematically stoked.”

Paul thinks a lot about who he is now and who he once was. “Luck beyond luck gilded me. If I couldn’t lift my arms, I could breathe. I could see. I could move more of my body than any diagnosis could have ever sanely promised. Great grief filled me up, I seemed to breathe it but what freed me was this: if my arms never worked again, never dressed myself, if I depended on others to do these things for the rest of my life, I no longer had to be, or even could be, who I once was. What I once was, I was broken. And new.” It is this sense of newness that propels Paul. Despite pain, isolation, and loneliness he finishes high school, then college and manages to get a Master of Fine Arts in poetry. Using a mouthpiece to type, we writes out his beautiful mesmerizing poems one at a time. We take for granted that if we want to write about something in the middle of the night we can reach for our pencils, pens, pad, or computers and go at it. This isn’t the case for Paul. He can’t reach for pen and paper, computer, or any aids for his writing. He must wait for morning and, because of this, he has lost many poems.

He is blessed with a supportive family who help him individuate and reach his potential. They offer kind support without enabling. Paul is pushed, like a baby bird, out of the nest, and he learns to fly. He flies to all kinds of adventures, some of which we share with him smiling, and others that require kleenex. When he has his first book of poetry published, when he makes his closest friends, when he is able to be intimate with the woman he loves, we cheer for him. When he’s mugged in an elevator while he is helpless to do anything to fight back, we are angry at his perpetrator and sad beyond measure at Paul’s plight. We share his feelings of harassment at his job in Tuscaloosa and wish we could give his supervisor a piece of our minds. When his day caretaker brings his Romanian father in to try an old world remedy for Paul’s twisted ankle, we hold our breaths because it requires setting fire to Paul’s skin. Oh my God!!!

Paul talks eloquently about the first poem he ever wrote and his rush home to write it. Along the way he worries whether the automatic doors to his apartment will work, whether the elevator is broken down, are the chair lifts in the buses functional. All those things that able-bodied people take for granted can create huge and, sometimes, insurmountable challenges for Paul.

Paul has an ebullient curiosity about the world, an energy to explore his surroundings and the spirit of a poet. His resilience is a lesson to us all. He perseveres and he creates beauty and loveliness from his world. He is a person of sensitivity and empathy, watching others for signs into their souls. This book is not meant to be an “inspirational” book or a religious book. It is a book about a man who, despite great odds, goes on to make a quality life for himself, drawn from the creative spirit within him that calls out to him for expression. Paul Guest must be an amazing man. He certainly is a wonderful writer.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco (May 4, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Guest
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Quadriplegics in fiction: The Dive from Claussen’s Pier by Ann Packer and there’s Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series

Bibliography:

• One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (May 2010)

Poetry

• The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (2003)
• Notes for My Body Double (October 2007)
• My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (November 2008)