Life in the Rainbow - Hardcover

Horan, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1883642027 ISBN 13: 9781883642020

Publisher: Steerforth Pr, 1996

Synopsis

Set in a mental institution, everything these strange and wonderful patients do will linger with me for a long while. --Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

The greedy, hostile world of a for-profit Chicago ``bughouse,'' as first-novelist Horan describes it, is no place for a young white male college graduate to serve as a nurse's aide, even if he does have a mandate from his barber and Henry David Thoreau. Footloose and full of Thoreau's ideals, Richard set out to walk from Boston to Alaska but ran out of steam in Chicago. A chance encounter with Nick the barber, who wraps his own ideals in a tough layer of worldly wisdom, convinces Richard to begin work at the Rainbow Home, a full-care facility recently turned from being state-funded to privately financed. There, he learns the tricks and terrors of his charges, from legless Cap'n John, who lives only to smoke, and paranoid Fred, a somnolent hulk who becomes ambulatory only when enraged, a state induced by deliberate physical and verbal abuse, to ex-boxer Megs, at 80 still ready to punch the moment anyone gets in his face. With co-workers Kelvin and Dorothy, Richard expands the daily ritual of care for such wards of the state to include protection against profit-hungry nurses and administrators, who are keen to ship them all to a county lock-up in order to make room for private, better-paying customers. The anti-administrator cause is hopeless, however, and the old residents are ultimately removed, Kelvin loses his job, and Richard is demoted to serving the very clients whose presence he resents. After a close encounter with a nymphomaniac, he bonds with young Teddy, a mechanic who was brain-damaged in a motorcycle accident, and when Teddy's family decides that his own home is healthier than the Rainbow Home, Richard accepts the job offered him as Teddy's live-in attendant. Episodic in the extreme, but the individual insights and human touches are frank and well-presented, making this more a harbinger of good things to come than an unqualified success. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Less a novel than a series of brief character sketches, Horan's debut weakly limns a group of mentally challenged people who live in an "asane asylum" where "ev'ryt'ing is upaside down." Inspired by Thoreau, narrator Richard, a recent college grad, is walking from Boston to Alaska when he stops at a barbershop in Chicago. At the suggestion of the friendly, stereotypically sagacious barber, he commits himself to a nine-month stint as a nurse's aide at The Rainbow Home. The inhabitants there include the expected roster: a paranoid schizophrenic, a multiple personality, a victim of Down's syndrome, an autistic, a monomaniac, an obsessive and so on. Richard's profiles of them provide little more than would be garnered from a social worker's files; one chapter simply notes basic facts from a patient's records. After nine months, Richard leaves to work as a private aide to one of the patients. What drama there is revolves around a new owner's attempt to remove the current residents to turn the place into a profitable private institution, but this plot ploy never reaches a proper crescendo of conflict or suspense.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Steerforth Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1883642027
• ISBN 13: 9781883642020
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 164