Simon Van Booy’s new novel is about an elderly woman looking back on her life while dealing with a new companion.
The redoubtable Simon Van Booy has performed another small literary miracle. In fact, smallness matters exceptionally in his new novel.” gathers you in fast. It is a deep, moving and vibrant saga. While compact in scope, it gets a lot done and never comes near its most obvious risk — sentimentality.
Yet a certain stubborn trait in Helen triggers a Rube Goldberg-like chain of marvelous events. “Over the past several months,” Van Booy writes, “Helen has become curious about what people throw away.” Late one night, she ventures out to investigate a neighbor’s curbside discards and finds a fish tank containing a familiar toy figure, a plastic deep-sea diver. Moved by the prompted memory of her son’s childhood, Helen struggles to haul the fish tank home in the cold rain.
When a couple of emergencies activate Helen’s previously camouflaged identity, she is forced to rally. She reminds herself in one frightened moment to calm down and breathe; “when the jaw is relaxed, the tongue can go limp. Her hands stop shaking. Her vision sharpens and Helen can feel her mind emerging from the haze of her advanced age, like Excalibur from the lake.”
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