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Summary
Summary
Sent to a "therapeutic community" for autism at the age of eleven, Todd Aaron, now in his fifties, is the "Old Fox" of Payton LivingCenter. A joyous man who rereads the encyclopedia compulsively, he is unnerved by the sudden arrivals of a menacing new staffer and a disruptive, brain-injured roommate. His equilibrium is further worsened by Martine, a one-eyed new resident who has romantic intentions and convinces him to go off his meds to feel "normal" again. Undone by these pressures, Todd attempts an escape to return "home" to his younger brother and to a childhood that now inhabits only his dreams. Written astonishingly in the first-person voice of an autistic, adult man, Best Boy--with its unforgettable portraits of Todd's beloved mother, whose sweet voice still sings from the grave, and a staffer named Raykene, who says that Todd "reflects the beauty of His creation"--is a piercing, achingly funny, finally shattering novel no reader can ever forget.
Author Notes
Eli Gottlieb is the author of Best Boy, among other novels. His works have been translated into a dozen languages. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Todd Aaron has lived at the Payton Living Center, a therapeutic community for those with autism, for more than 40 years. Known as the "village elder," he passes his time working with the center's grounds crew, or serving hot lunch at a local school. But when a new roommate, the brain-injured, abrasive Tommy Doon, and a new staff member, Mike Hinton, suddenly appear, Todd's quiet existence begins to unravel. Mike reminds Todd of his abusive dead father and uses Todd as cover to assist him in devious acts, while Tommy spends his time yelling at Todd and searching for whatever dark secrets his roommates may have. Added to this is the arrival of Martine, a one-eyed resident who takes a shine to Todd, and whom he admires. Pressure builds, and Todd decides his best option is to escape the center and make his way back to his hometown and his wealthy brother. The latest from Gottlieb (The Boy Who Went Away) is written through the perspective of Todd: his voice is spectacular, oscillating between casual and obsessive and frequently challenging the stereotypes that haunt those with autism and similar conditions. The story will appeal to a very broad range of readers: it's a fast read, and the plot is never less than captivating. Some narrative threads dissolve, but the conclusion is very satisfying, and Gottlieb's attention to crafting Todd's internal monologue is something to behold. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the clear-as-a-tinkling-bell voice of Todd Aaron, Gottlieb reveals how certain events and experiences cause this fiftysomething man with autism to suddenly go into a post-post-post-adolescent rebellion. For decades since his diagnosis, Todd has been a model care-facility resident, sharing housekeeping tasks with his roommate and working on the facility's grounds or in a local school cafeteria. Thanks to his deceased mother's wishes and estate, he has enjoyed a relatively carefree life, only occasionally yearning to return to his parents' former home, which now only exists in Todd's memory. But when a new, bad-tempered roommate, a man who smiles by lifting his upper lip, and a naughty woman enter Todd's life, it upsets the calm order of things. As Gottlieb deftly guides us through Todd's thought processes, all of his (admittedly) pretty bad decisions do seem reasonable. His frustration with roommate Tommy Doon, his abject fear of the new staff guy who abandons Todd in order to tutor another resident, and, finally, his excitement to experience life off his meds culminate in a disastrous escape. But in the way of all things happening for a reason, Gottlieb's marvelous novel has happened so that readers may be in awe of all the universe's creations.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN ROBERT FAGGEN interviewed Ken Kesey for The Paris Review in the early 1990s, he asked about the origins of the author's most famous merry prankster, Randle P. McMurphy from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Here's Kesey's response: "McMurphy comes from Sunday matinees, from American westerns. He's Shane that rides into town, shoots the bad guys and gets killed in the course of the movie. McMurphy is a particular American cowboy hero, almost two-dimensional. He gains dimension from being viewed through the lens of Chief Bromden's Indian consciousness." The answer is noteworthy in how it prioritizes Chief's perception over McMurphy's heroism. Chief's narration is deluded, tragically so, and yet it deepens, broadens and ultimately completes McMurphy. Without Bromden's vision, the story is less a social commentary, less an anti-establishment call to arms, and more a misogynist fantasy of rugged individualism. McMurphy's story matters because of who tells it. That the storyteller is a paranoid schizophrenic Native American who retreats into imaginary fog every time the chaos hits the Combine isn't arbitrary or insignificant. It's the most arresting component of the novel. Since the publication of "Cuckoo's Nest" in 1962, the literature of institutionalized life has nearly become a genre unto itself. There are obligatory characters (domineering doctors, subversive staffers, misfit patients eager to mobilize behind a newly admitted leader who's primed to rage against the machine) and familiar story elements (hospital as microcosm, conformity versus creativity, thwarted escapes). The subject remains gravely significant, and vast enough to allow for countless variations. Whether it's a rehab facility or a cancer ward, readers return to these fictions in hopes of seeing a patient's pain relieved. Eli Gottlieb's affecting fourth novel, "Best Boy," is a worthy and timely addition to the canon of hospital lit. "Best Boy" is the first-person account of Todd Aaron, a 50-something autistic man who's been institutionalized for more than 40 years. The Payton LivingCenter is peopled with orderlies and patients who are by turns belligerent and compassionate, dangerously disturbed and insanely well adjusted. Todd spends his days working with Payton's lawn crew and dolloping out lunch at a nearby high school. He loves reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which he calls "Mr. B") and playing on the computer ("Mr. C"), and Gottlieb exploits those devices to augment Todd's vocabulary throughout the novel. Todd is a model citizen, the "village elder" who dutifully swallows his pills, endures daily torments from an obnoxious roommate and pines for his rich, distant brother who promises visits that rarely come to pass. It's a familiar and depressing depiction of the involuntarily committed, but Todd finds comfort in the routines and mood-flattening meds. Or he did. When a new, menacing orderly and an alluring, one-eyed patient arrive, they throw his predictable peace into disarray. The tensions are immediate and palpable. Mike Hinton, the new hire, wears a mullet and a "mustache that drooped on either side like a picture of a Civil War general in a magazine"; he reminds Todd of his dead, abusive father and capitalizes on his trusting nature to take unforgivable advantage of another patient. The mysterious and mysteriously eye-patched Martine Calhoun regales Todd with stories of her past adventures and touts the benefits of a non-drug-addled mind. A strong and luminous young woman, she teaches him how to fake swallowing his pills and gussies him up to meet her parents when they visit. Todd is understandably bewitched. As his head clears and life at Payton starts to seem more treacherous than he had ever noticed, a nascent thought takes hold: "My new Idea is that I leave, 'bye. My Idea is that I walk out of Payton and go home to live." It's a simple, doomed plan, and it makes for fast and satisfying reading. Given Todd's autism, this novel will inevitably draw comparisons to Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," and for those readers looking for another narrator with a pyrotechnic voice and hard-driving obsessiveness, "Best Boy" will come up short. Todd is older and quieter, his voice generally more restrained. Phrasings and descriptions do occasionally ring false, mostly in places where the author seems to underestimate Todd's powers of expression, but overall the narration is consistent and authentic. Gottlieb, whose celebrated first novel, "The Boy Who Went Away," also followed an autistic character, writes Todd as high-functioning, articulate and innocent despite intimations of a violent history. He recalls his tyrannical father drinking like this: "The bottle rose in his hand. It attached itself to his mouth and his eyes shut while his throat made elevator movements." Cash registers "open like laughing mouths with bills where their tongues should be and flashing numbers for eyes." In the hands of a lesser writer, such observations could easily fall into cliché, but Gottlieb respects his narrator too much for pandering stereotypes. Todd's is an engaging and nuanced consciousness, so vital that the reader feels profound tenderness - and distinct fear - as this sweet man ventures out into the world. If there's a problem with Todd's perspective, it has less to do with execution and more to do with strategy. Can this narrator put the content of his own journey in a context that will reward the reader's attention? So few can. McMurphy's story is enlarged by the meaning Chief imposes on it. Gatsby's life resonates because of the affection and latitude Nick Carraway affords him. Could Beloved tell her own story? Could Lolita? This isn't an issue of unreliability - Todd's account benefits immensely from those moments when he's least reliable - but rather a question of narrative positioning. The most moving and original aspect of "Best Boy" is the vantage point from which Todd observes his life, and yet, in translating that perspective for the reader, Gottlieb seems at times to miss something crucial. That something might well be called wonder. Todd has no one standing in awe of him, no one to bear witness to his actions except himself. Maybe such isolation is part of Gottlieb's point, but because Todd cannot apprehend the magnitude of his plan, the story can come off feeling smaller and less trenchant than it is. Ultimately, though, Todd's experience transcends the limitations of its rendering. Gottlieb ties off the narrative threads in a loose but satisfying knot, and he complicates Todd's family and innocent persona with revelations from his past. This complexity is earned and pleasing, not least in how it shines a new light on his brother's absence. A final surprise from Todd's dead beloved mother is somewhat predictable but poignant, freighting the novel's last pages with an affirming ache. "Sometimes I think I'm forgetting about other things on purpose," Todd says, "so I can concentrate better on the remaining memories I have of her in my head and on the atoms left in my lungs." Most everyone reads "Cuckoo's Nest" as an empowering and triumphant story of sacrifice, but a darker, more realistic reading is equally possible. What if McMurphy was just one of Chief Bromden's delusions, as fantastical as the imaginary fog? What if Chief never escaped at all? Kesey's novel opens and closes in ways that suggest the narrator is telling McMurphy's tale from behind the hospital's walls. Gottlieb's fine novel - like Todd's disorder - doesn't allow for any such ambiguity, and the clarity is comforting. There's no doubt Todd flies the coop, and as ill advised as his flight might be, we stand on the ground below, inspired and on the verge of awe, briefly enchanted by the simplicity of his soaring. 'My new Idea is that I leave 'bye. My Idea is that I walk out. . . and go home to live.' BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON is the author of the story collection "Corpus Christi" and, most recently, the novel "Remember Me Like This."
Kirkus Review
After more than 40 years in an institution, an autistic man acts on his yearning to see his childhood home in this eloquent, sensitive rendering of a marginalized life.Gottlieb (The Face Thief, 2012, etc.) returns in his fourth novel to the territory of his award-winning first, The Boy Who Went Away (1997), which also concerned a family of four and focused in part on a mother's efforts to avoid sending her autistic son away. This novel has a very similar family but with the two brothers grown, the parents dead, and the world viewed through the exiled sibling's eyes. The first-person narrator is autistic Todd Aaron, who sees life as immediate phenomena in a way that produces fresh, even poetic imageslike "typewriters that are filled with millipede arms"though occasionally they feel forced. Todd's voice also is informed by his reading of the Encyclopedia Britannica and his access to a computer. Mr. B and Mr. C, as they are known, supply a plausible boost in knowledge and some humor to the observations of what is already a high-functioning mind. At the Payton LivingCenter, Todd has his brother's phone calls and infrequent visits, a kindly staff aide, an obnoxious roommate, a pleasurable interest in a recent female arrival, and an instant fear of a new orderly who reminds him of his abusive father. That fear impels Todd to make escape plans. The novel is so economical with its actionsuch "homes" rely after all on routine and mood-flattening medsthat revealing the essential few adventures would be spoiling a great deal. Gottlieb wisely doesn't resolve everything, but he packs years into a tightly composed climactic scene. Less satisfying is the somewhat demonized brother, a bully in his youth, a cheat in maturity, and barely trying, maybe only from guilt, not to bail on his sibling altogether. Gottlieb merits praise for both the endearing eloquence of Todd's voice and a deeply sympathetic parable that speaks to a time when rising autism rates and long-lived elders force many to weigh tough options. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Gottlieb's prize-winning 1997 debut novel, The Boy Who Went Away, told the complex, heartbreaking story of a family struggling to raise an autistic child. By the end of the story, it becomes clear that the family will have to institutionalize their young son. In some important ways, Gottlieb's powerful and engaging new work-also about autism-is a sequel to that first book. The narrator is an autistic man, Todd Aaron, who has been living in therapeutic communities for over 40 years. In some ways, Todd is the young son from that first novel, now over 50 years old. Gottlieb has created something quite exceptional in this character. His interior life and psychology are convincingly drawn. He is beset with fears, confusions, and misunderstandings-along with disturbing memories and violent emotions-and these are described with great sympathy and insight. The novel is about Todd's daily life at Payton Living Center and his increasingly urgent yearning to return "home." Although he suffers many indignities and cruelties, life is made endurable by memories of his departed mother, whose wisdom and kindness shine throughout the novel. VERDICT A deeply moving portrait of a kind and gentle soul. Recommended for all readers. [See Prepub Alert, 3/2/15.]--Patrick -Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.