Heft By Liz Moore Hutchinson, £9.99Arthur Opp has not left his Brooklyn house in 10 years. A former academic, he now weighs more than 35st and is unable to walk more than a few steps without becoming breathless; his only contact with the outside world is through the delivery men who bring the food and other items he orders online.
Kel Keller is a teenage boy from working-class Yonkers. He attends high school in an affluent New York suburb, where he has managed to fit in with his rich classmates thanks to his sports skills and quiet determination.
These very different people are the narrators of Liz Moore’s heartbreaking and hopeful new book. They’re linked by Kel’s mother, Charlene, Arthur’s former student, who contacts Arthur asking for advice about her son, who is more interested in baseball than in academia. Charlene and Arthur have corresponded by post for years. But we soon discover that both have avoided the truth about their lives in their letters.
Heft is a novel about loneliness and about kindness. Both Arthur and Kel are isolated from the world in different ways, partly by choice and partly by circumstance. The two narrative voices are distinct and unforgettable. Arthur’s voice is precise and slightly formal, yet luminous with the promise of poetry. Kel’s is quieter, full of self-doubt and anger and tenderness. Both are refreshingly unsentimental. In lesser hands, Arthur would be grotesque and pathetic, but although we feel sorry for him we respect him: he is self-aware, insightful and intelligent. And he is kind – to Charlene and also to Yolanda, his new cleaning lady, with whom he develops his first friendship in decades.
As for Kel, his attempts to fit in at school and play baseball while caring for his mother, now a hopeless alcoholic and invalid, are utterly heartbreaking. We spend the book hoping Kel and Arthur will find each other, but along the way both find support from often unexpected sources. The world Arthur and Kel inhabit is sometimes cruel, sometimes senseless, but also contains people willing to connect with and help each other. Like its characters’ hearts, Heft is full of grace. It’s a beautifully written and very moving novel.
Anna Carey
The Life of Rebecca Jones
By Angharad Price, translated by Lloyd Jones
MacLehose Press, £10
Angharad Price’s novella, The Life of Rebecca Jones, is a potent reminder that not all British literature is written in English. Price’s book, originally published in Welsh, is a work of grace, beauty and great feeling. A former Wales Book of the Year, it shows again that the Welsh and, indeed, Scots Gaelic communities still produce profound works of literature in the cousin languages of Irish.
The story is set in a Welsh-speaking and small farming area of rural Wales and follows the life of Rebecca Jones, her parents and siblings through the span of the 20th century. Meshing the real Jones’s family with an imagined narrative, Price transforms the genre of memoir and redraws the boundaries between fact and fiction. The Jones family have their own share of woes but have a strong sense of faith with which to deal with them. God is in this story, as is the jousting between Protestant denominations.
The sacrifices that parents make for their children – and the sacrifices that life demands from them – will bring tears to the eyes of many readers. The women characters are reminiscent of another generation – frugal but determined – while the tight-lipped and hard-working men also strike a chord. Undoubtedly, an Irish reader will be struck by the similarities to Gaeltacht areas specifically and rural Ireland in general. The fat years of the Celtic Tiger have dulled the Irish memory of the very real (and not so distant) experience of hunger and illness endured by many generations.
Added to the eloquent story is Price’s wonderful prose – as mirrored in Lloyd Jones’s evocative translation – that moves the heart and fills the head with Price’s deeply felt reflections on kin and culture.
Pól Ó Muirí
In One Person
By John Irving
Doubleday, £18.99
At the end of John Irving's latest novel, his 13th, the book's narrator, bisexual Billy Abbott, admonishes a younger character with the words: "My dear boy, don't put a label on me. Don't make me a categorybefore you get to know me!" The italics and the exclamation mark are Irving's: throughout this feverishly ambitious, tediously long novel, our responses are orchestrated by the author's editorial tics.
Fans of Irving, and they are legion, will revel in the familiar architecture of this book. Both the settings and Abbott’s biography and profession – he becomes a writer – are the stock in trade of Irving’s fiction, some of which, including Setting Free the Bears and The World According to Garp, are joyous books that, certainly in this reviewer’s experience, can gently open a young and tentative reader to a world of contemporary American fiction. In One Person (the title is borrowed from Shakespeare’s Richard II: “Thus I play in one person many people / And none contented”) begins in a New England prep school, Favourite River Academy, where Billy, a fatherless boy described as “a little light in his loafers”, develops “crushes on all the wrong people”. Billy’s sexual awakening is then played out on the streets of Vermont and Vienna, in dormitories and digs, on wrestling mats and in gyms, and even in library basements, with characters of indeterminate gender, amid a plethora of desires and techniques and an assortment of lovingly described lingerie.
The problem with the book lies in exactly what Billy Abbott purports to rage against: Irving stocks his cupboards with so many manifestations of sexual multiplicity – cross-dressing grandfathers, predatory incestuous lesbians, testical-shaving transsexuals – that the book reads like a gender-bending miscellany, a catalogue of categories that flattens into inconsequentiality. He does, however, retrieve his reader in the novel’s latter stages, where he writes with clarity and compassion about the Aids epidemic: his forensic detailing of this merciless disease is deeply affecting.
At a time of important political debate on sexual equality in the US, one hopes that Irving’s message of inclusivity and tolerance, which just about manages to stay afloat in the maelstrom of this novel’s frivolity, is well heard.
Hilary Fannin
