Recent listens

Petey, by Ben Mikaelsen. Due to factors beyond my control I was obliged to either read or listen to this book. It's not an experience that I particularly enjoyed.

Partly this is because of the subject matter of the book. "Petey" is a man born with cerebral palsy, a disorder which in the early twentieth century was frequently mistaken for extreme mental retardation. After his parents find themselves unable to care for him, he lives practically his entire life in a series of institutions. The author describes in numbing detail the progress of each and every acquaintance who gets to know Petey throughout his long, long life. Since Petey is unable to move or speak clearly enough for most people to understand him, there's not much in the way of thrilling action or adventure. Petey is almost always a passive recipient of other people's actions, rather than an actor in his own right. This allows him to act as a kind of touchstone for other people's characters. Unfortunately, most of them aren't very interesting, either.

I can sympthasize with the plight of people like Petey, and it is an interesting experiment to try to construct a book out of the small details and slow routines of a life so constrained. Unfortunately, the author too often subjects his reader to preachy sentimentality and clumsy writing, especially in the second part of the book, in which Petey acts as a positive influence on a confused and lonely teenager. Worst of all is Mikaelsen's habit of attributing concrete actions to abstract concepts. ("Contentment smoothed his face...") One or two occurances of such phrases can be excused as a rhetorical flourish. But when they recur over and over and over again, I begin to wonder when abstract concepts like Anger, Compassion, Contentment, etc., grew arms and legs and started walking around on their own doing things to people. The worst example occurs in the very first chapter, when the author says of Petey's mother, "Fear gutted her mind," thus compounding logically fallacious reification with evident anatomical confusion.