“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)

“I was becoming a fabulous liar. It was like I’d been born to the outlaw life. If I lost my library job, I could go pro.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 9, 2011)

Debut novelist and elementary schoolteacher Rebecca Makkai combines a wily, madcap road trip with socially poignant conundrums and multiple themes in this coming-of-age story about a twenty-six-year-old children’s librarian, Lucy Hull, and a ten-year-old precocious book lover, Ian Drake, in Hanibal, Missouri. (Guess who is coming-of-age? Answer: not so evident.)

Lucy isn’t entirely sure that she’s a reliable narrator—part of our reading pleasure is to figure that out. She tells us in the enigmatic prologue “I’m not the hero of this story.” Is she the villain? And, if she is not the hero, who is? The answers turn out to be thoughtfully complex and yet exquisitely simple for those of us–and only for those of us–whose love of reading is almost religious (upside down pun there).

Lucy has been sneaking laudable books to Ian, whose evangelical, anorexic mother, Janet, will only allow him to read books “with the breath of God in them.” No books with content matter related to magic, witchcraft, wizardry, the occult, weaponry, adult content matter, evolution, or Halloween. No authors/books that question authority and explore complicated issues, or that have morally ambiguous themes. Oh, or contain a “sensitive” male character.

Janet has enrolled her son in the Glad Heart Ministries youth group with Pastor Bob, in order to de-gayify her son for his proto-gay behaviors. Pastor Bob is a “former” homosexual married to a “cured” once-upon-a-time lesbian, who believes that “sexuality is a choice, not an identity.” His goal is to “speak to our children before the secular media has reached them with its political agenda.” It makes your hair stand up and splits your ends.

One morning, when Lucy opens the library, she discovers that Ian has been camped out there all night. This sets the stage for the fugitive scene–adult and child on the lam, playing spontaneous road trip games and mimicking passages of children’s books. (OK, the reader needs to suspend a little judgment here on how Ian maneuvers this, but this is fiction, so waive a little realism for a little magic, capisce?).

Lucy, as it turns out, has some, ahem… issues. A Chicago-raised Mount Holyoke graduate with a Russian émigré father and Jewish-American mother, she has a predilection for flight and self-flagellation. Her dad was a revolutionary, and his shady business dealings and questionable money sources have been a cause of discomfort all of Lucy’s life. It seems she also has a knack for prevaricating. And indolence. Her adult decisions have, up to this time, been aimed at not taking action in her life, other than putting distance between her and her parents. She’s “a would-be revolutionary stuck at a desk.”

As Lucy and Ian cross state line after state line, she has moments of doubt and dread about her hapless journey with a juvenile. Although she tries to remind herself that Ian maneuvered this odyssey, she acknowledges her complicity. Lucy wants to save Ian from the clutches of religiosity. She impugns Janet Drake for wanting to censor a highly intelligent boy’s mettle. But is she trying to censor the censor? She has doubts. But the voice of her insurrectionist father vexes her.

There are flaws, admittedly. Yet, they are easy to ignore when trumped by the nimble narrative and crack characterizations. Librarians beware—Lucy doesn’t have her Masters of Library Science. And, as mentioned above, the inadvertent “kidnapping” scene raises a few eyebrows of believability.

But this beguiling story captivates, nonetheless. Ian and Lucy have a tart, biting relationship rather than a sentimental, precious one. Moreover, Makkai deftly weaves in children’s literary lore, including The Wizard of Oz, Madeline, Charlotte’s Web, and many others, bolstering the narrative. Moreover, Lucy’s subversive ire for social liberty and freedom of expression are ripe and riveting. Makkai pushes the envelope, and the reader may wonder if the story will wax pedantic, but the author doesn’t disappoint with easy answers; she doesn’t manipulate Lucy’s rant into her personal crusade.

The Borrower appeals, inevitably, to the ardent reader whose love of books starts with the mind but voyages to the soul. It is a journey of self-discovery and sanctuary, finding home wherever you are, and the courage to face your future.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 30 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult; First Edition edition (June 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Makkai
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé

Bibliography:

• The Borrower (June 2011)