The premise of a young woman using a machine to allow a man who has a disability to communicate with her, set against the backdrop of observations about world languages and theories about linguistics was decent enough, and it got more interesting when the authenticity of his communication came into question. She’s using a Ouija board like process with a keyboard, you see, something that others can’t replicate, and she’s also got a backstory of her own, widowed and with a small child.

This had intelligent writing as usual from duBois, but I confess it was a story that was hard to fully connect to. Sometimes the theories of linguistic determinism got too esoteric and in the way of the story, and central aspects of the man’s condition didn’t always seem logical. He somehow managed to read a large library of books despite his mother propping them open to random pages, and without her understanding he read them, for example. Another is that in a critical moment with enormous repercussions, he opts to not communicate, which seemed very unlikely. I think it would have been more interesting had there been even more ambiguity in what was happening between the two of them.

Not a bad read though, and I liked the little tidbits about languages that were peppered into the text, some of which I extracted below.

Quotes:
On the reverence for books, I felt this one:
“I had the impulse to throw the book out the window, but of course I did not. I have a reverential, nearly talismanic regard for books, all books – even Alec Q. Tyruil’s.”

On language:
“And so I attempted the Slavs [the languages], and was quickly introduce to a hallucinatory landscape of semantic categories, metaphoric distinctions, rabbit-hole semantics – a kaleidoscope of nuance I struggled to perceive, let alone deploy. French and Spanish were like masks – sometimes crude, hardly ever convincing, but at least they fit your face. Russian seemed to occupy some different dimension altogether, and for the first time in my life, I felt not merely stupid but simple.”

“Russian has one word for ‘light blue’ and another for ‘dark blue’; Russian speakers do not register these as variations of the same color. While the Herero of Namibia have the same word for blue and green; to them, this is a single hue.”

“The Tuyuca language requires speakers to specify how, or if, they know a thing is true. ‘I hear this happening, I see this is happening, they say this is happening.’ Bulgarian has entire aspects devoted to the hedging of bets: the re-narrative conveys information received through hearsay, the inferential covers statements gleaned from other facts, the dubitative expresses a sense of standing skepticism on the part of the speaker.”

“Omenie: Romanian for the virtue of being fully human. We don’t have this one in English.”

“Saudade (Portuguese): a feeling of melancholic longing for an irretrievable person or place. Has analogues in Welsh (hiraeth) and German (Sehnsucht) and perhaps in some combination of our ‘nostalgia’ and ‘utopia,’ derived from Greek, especially if we consider that utopos originally just meant ‘nowhere.’”

“In Russian – in many languages – possession is expressed not with a verb but a subject. Something less like ‘I have it’ and something more like ‘it is on me.’ To an English speaker, this makes the act of having sound strangely passive: as though the thing in your possession could, at any moment, get up and walk away.”

Lastly, this one, which I found funny:
“We must imagine Sisyphus happy, you said once, after discovering green peppers on your pizza.” ( )

This novel is built upon an interesting premise. A young widow, working on a graduate degree in language is expelled from her program for some pretty dubious charges that seem to arise out of petty professional jealousy. I'll paraphrase here something attributed to the late Henry Kissinger—academic politics are brutal because the rewards are so small.

In this case, the protagonist, Angela, winds up taking a job as a research assistant on a project involving a specious device that purports to communicate with patients who lack language. If one excuses DuBois for these admittedly weak plot devices, the narrative takes off when Angela begins to work with a disabled and shuttered young man about her own age. Using the device, she seems to discover that he may have a rich inner life. An unlikely physical attraction ensues between the two with negative consequences for Angela.

The narrative includes multiple asides on how language works in various cultures. These only seem to interrupt the smooth flow of the plot. Likewise, Angela's relationship with her own daughter and mother, acting as the main childcare provider, never develops well enough to become much more than another aside. Similarly, her relationship with her deceased husband is just left there hanging. The most compelling elements in the narrative, however, are its exploration of disability and its impact on families and caregivers. duBois' suggestions that the communication between the two lovers may have never actually existed, but was some ill-defined delusion brought on by the stresses in Angela's own life and magical thinking are subtle plot elements but intriguing to contemplate. Indeed, maybe the communication device was only a typewriter as some skeptics implied. ( )

This novel is told from the perspective of Angela, a widowed mother of a young child. Following her expulsion from Harvard's PhD program, she is faced with thousands in student debt and forced to take a job that is neither within her experience or expertise teaching non-verbal people to communicate on something resembling a typewriter.

Sam, a 28-year-old man, is her first client, who lives with his single mother. As they begin to work together to establish communication, Angela is stunned to discover that Sam is able to relate his emotions and an understanding of books he has read that are complicated and erudite.

Jennifer duBois has done a masterful job of creating their interactions and evolving relationship. We are left wondering if Angela's results are real or imagined. I would like to think that the unbelievable is often believable. ( )