A lingering presence

The One-In-A Million
Boy
Monica Wood
Hachette
2016, pp 406, Rs 399

This is a one-in-a-million book, where the reader comes to know by the third page that a young boy is dead. But his spectre and loving presence will haunt one throughout its pages.

Only known as “the boy” as the story unfolds, it is also the tale of its three other characters who find their lives intertwined in an effort to fulfil the dead lad’s last wish. They are Ona Viktus, a 104-year-old woman of Lithuanian origins, with whom the boy had set up an unlikely friendship, his estranged father Quinn and his ex-wife, and the boy’s mother, Belle. The story is set in Maine in the US, where Ona lives alone. The reader is hooked from the word go, as the author delves into the flawed lives of each of the protagonists, whilst providing a sympathetic understanding of their choices.

The generation gap-bridging friendship develops as the result of a series of Boy Scout assignments, which Quinn later gets roped into completing, at the behest of ex-wife Belle. The story explains how Quinn “wanted to save her but had no talent for anything more interpersonally complicated than to obey commands as a form of atonement.” Here is the unpeeling of one layer, as a reason is offered for the dissolution of the relationship between Quinn and Belle.

This desire to atone keeps surfacing several times in the book, even as it humanises both Quinn and Ona and explains their compulsions. The boy’s 29-paged diary that Quinn filches from Belle’s place, and subsequently returns, makes him aware of many of the lad’s views on his newfound friend, including that she “is EXTREMELY inspiring in her magic powers and AMAZING life events!!!”

With the boy not there, the story keeps shifting back and forth between the past and the present, as Monica Wood employs loaded imagery to explore thoughts and emotions, including the less-understood aspects of memory. Ona is unable to understand how Lithuanian words, which she had left behind in her childhood, pop out from nowhere in her conversations with the boy. The tragedy of the loss of a language to an immigrant, even as a new one is gained, makes for interesting reading.

The reader is made to understand the importance of language and how “style could move listeners to pity, to reverence, to the purchase of a stew pot they didn’t need.”

Rich imagery surfaces again and again and plays such an important part in hooking the reader to the lives of this book’s protagonists, as does the textured approach. Can there be an alternative to experiencing loss as Quinn “was left with neither the ice-smooth paralysis of shock, nor the crystalline focus of grief, but rather with a heart-swelling package of murky and miserable ironies.”

Quinn, who has been a largely absent father, is befuddled by his son’s Asperger’s Syndrome-like symptoms, his obsession with world-records, and his list of gathered symptoms about the world that he recites in sets of 10s. At the end of several chapters, Wood leaves us with these lists, which she tells us are authentic, unless displaced by a subsequent record-breaker.

The author’s success lies in inveigling the reader into loving this otherworldly creature, the boy, who is absent and yet at the heart of everything that happens in this book. The tragedy of how his death comes about is heart-rending and Monica is able to make one feel regret and a terrible sense of identifiable loss at his passing. Ona is able to love the boy whilst he is present, in contrast to Quinn the musician, for whom the realisation dawns too late. The boy’s unpretentious truthfulness and honest demeanour makes Ona open up to him in myriad ways, which includes the revelation of long-buried secrets. For Quinn, each encounter with the boy is torturous as they both seem to labour to establish a connection.

Towards the second part, the story seems to meander a bit, and it can be speculated that even 100 pages less could still have got to the crux of the story and its surprise ending. At the end, there is a realisation that connections can be missed and that what can be construed as a lack of love or understanding could actually be a misreading of the situation at hand. The ways in which love can be proffered are heart-warming as much as they are heart-rending. The reader is likely to be led into wondering about human relationships and the many possibilities that can be missed.

A very worthwhile read, as it might help one to look inward and feel grateful for the insights. The feel-good factor is the boy whose presence is all-pervading and fills one with positivity.