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Summary
Summary
Miles Adler-Hart starts eavesdropping to find out what his mother is planning for his life. When he learns instead that his parents are separating, he enlists his best friend, Hector, to help investigate. Both boys are in thrall to Miles' unsuspecting mother, Irene. Their innocent detective work quickly takes them to the far reaches of adult privacy as they acquire knowledge that will affect the family's well-being, prosperity, and sanity.
Author Notes
Mona Simpson lives in Santa Monica and New York City.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
Nine-year-old Miles, desperate to join in the playground chat about TV series Survivor, rigs a walkie-talkie under his parents' bed. It turns out they don't talk about Survivor much, but Miles learns about their relationship and, as his parents separate, his curiosity becomes obsessive. He waits outside doors and listens on the phone; as months become years he recruits his best friend Hector, taps the phone and starts meeting a private detective. Simpson's wonderful novel is about Miles's discoveries - notably the mysteries surrounding his mother's new partner - but it's also a compelling portrait of a quirky boy and his muddled family. Miles makes mutants from his toys, sells soup from his locker, joins the school's LGBT club in an attempt to extend his retail empire and inches his way towards romance. The many neat touches include the household blackboard his mum scratches maxims on ("some infinities are bigger than others") to an animal-rights subplot. The result is a funny and sad drama about intimacies, deception and growing up. James Smart - James Smart Nine-year-old Miles, desperate to join in the playground chat about TV series Survivor, rigs a walkie-talkie under his parents' bed. It turns out they don't talk about Survivor much, but Miles learns about their relationship and, as his parents separate, his curiosity becomes obsessive. - James Smart.
New York Review of Books Review
THE WORD "SPYING" now brings to mind boundless digital nets trawling the ether for millions of emails at a time, but Miles Adler-Hart, the young protagonist of Mona Simpson's sixth novel, practices snooping the old-school way. He plants a walkie-talkie in his parents' bedroom. He eavesdrops on therapy sessions through a heating vent. He listens to phone conversations by carefully picking up a landline in the next room. Miles is 9 when "Casebook" starts, in 2001, and his furtive habits soon yield knowledge about the precarious state of his family. Hiding beneath his parents' bed, he hears his father telling his mother, Irene, "that he didn't think of her that way anymore either." "What way?" Miles wonders. "And why either? I could hardly breathe." After the marriage ends, Irene begins dating a friend named Eli, who visits California from Washington, D.C., where he lives and works for the National Science Foundation. Or so he claims. At first, Miles is glad for his mother's new companion. "I really was relieved. The nights we went to our dad's in the canyon, I thought, she had someone to talk to." But Miles's friend Hector suspects that Eli is hiding something, and he persuades his buddy that they should investigate. By the time they're teenagers, they're following clues around greater Los Angeles with the help of a private eye named Ben Orion. As the story progresses deeper into the 21st century, there are mentions of email, and Miles uses Google to search for a street address and to look up Xanax after he finds a bottle of it in the house. But the search for information about Eli remains oddly removed from the Internet. In the book's opening pages, Irene is roundly drawn. She describes herself as "pretty for a mathematician." She keeps an old blackboard in the kitchen, on which she scribbles high-end inspirational quotes, like this one she attributes to Einstein: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." She "listened to gospel, but she didn't believe in God." She is (Efferent from other people but "probably would rather have been more like everybody else." So why does "Casebook," occupied with the same complex familial concerns that Simpson has vividly animated for so long, feel like a misstep? The book suffers most from its uncertain register, with Miles too often sounding as if he's narrating events in real time as a child, rather than as someone in his 20s looking back on formative experiences. Overhearing a conversation about possible Eving arrangements, he writes: "It took me a minute to understand: They were talking about custody. My parents must have been fighting over us!" He lapses in and out, mostly out, of his latter-day vantage point, like Kevin Costner navigating a British accent. In this way, especially, "Casebook" is not flattered by comparison with Simpson's reputation-making 1986 debut novel, "Anywhere but Here," in which a woman recalls her troubled mother with a tersely poetic blend of childlike befuddlement and adult perspective. Miles feels more like the guide through a novel for younger readers. As Eli and his mother get more serious, he wonders: "Were they getting married? What about his kid? Would it live with us? . . .I wanted things to stand still." There are darker glimpses of how Miles's surveillance of adults affects his development. He thinks of sex as a "lower, threatening world." Hearing his parents argue about their lack of passion "neutered me somehow." More mysteriously, coming across naked pictures of his mother "made me feel exposed. As if I would never be attractive." These are moments when Miles the adult might offer context or reveal something deeper about the person he has become, but they pass in flurries of young wonder: "People in my class at school, some of them, they were having sex already. We all knew exactly who. Simon told us. What was sex, even?" Simpson has also adorned the book with a needless conceit that seems to betray a lack of confidence in the material. It opens with a "Note to Customer" written by the owner of a comics store, who says the book we're about to read was written by one of two friends behind a classic comic called "Two Sleuths." It becomes clear that Miles wrote "Casebook," and that Hector later added his own thoughts, which appear as footnotes. There are just 21 annotations by Hector, many of them less than a dozen words long. The fruits of this device, announced so loudly at the book's start and so ripe with possibilities for complicating Miles's memories, are conspicuously flavorless. Typical is a moment in which Miles describes Hector's favorite Roald Dahl story. We're then drawn by an asterisk to the bottom of the page, where Hector notes: "Still my favorite." There is a sense throughout of an author operating just a degree or two removed from her comfort zone. This is not Tom Wolfe implausibly ventriloquizing the college set in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," but Simpson's decision to so fully inhabit the mind of a boy forces her into a simpler style and cordons her off from more nuanced insights, despite the fact that her themes remain humble but profound: compromises brought on by love; what we can know about other people; the unavoidable and unintended effects of parents on children. The constant use of unexplained nicknames (Miles's mother is "the Mims"; his younger twin sisters are "Boop One" and "Boop Two") stands out because they push an intimacy with the family and its dynamics that is never fully established through more rigorous methods. For much of the novel, the stage blocking is too visible. Eli's Efe is, in fact, not what he says it is - among other things, he lives in California. But the nature of his deception becomes obvious long before the final page. The second half of the book leans on descriptions of school-age high jinks, Eke Miles and Hector dropping unwanted pets into Eli's yard as revenge for his lies. Near the end, we're shown illustrations from the pair's "classic" comic, leaving us perplexed about why it's a classic. Like the Hardy Boys or Veronica Mars, Miles learns a few lessons about life by doggedly pursuing the truth. ("Everyone had secrets; I understood now that I did. With that one revelation, the world multiplied.") But for readers of Simpson's more skillful novels, who presumably learned these particular lessons long ago, it's not clear what "Casebook" has to teach. Simpson's young protagonist practices snooping the old-school way. JOHN WILLIAMS is a senior staff editor at The Times.
