The Boy Who Went Away - Softcover

Gottlieb, Eli

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1631490923 ISBN 13: 9781631490927

Publisher: Liveright, 2015

Synopsis

Winner of the American Academy’s Rome Prize for Fiction and the McKitterick Prize, Eli Gottlieb’s tender, harrowing coming-of-age novel finally returns to print.

Denny Graubart, child-narrator and “domestic surveillance expert,” is having some terrible suspicions about his mother and autistic brother. It’s the 1960s, aka the Diagnostic Dark Ages of Autism, and while his mother struggles to keep his brother out of an institution, signs of something more disturbing are beginning to emerge before young Denny’s eyes. Battered by his own tragicomic sexual awakening during a long, hot summer, Denny will eventually find his most horrified suspicions about his family confirmed. A powerfully drawn portrait of two brothers locked into an asymmetrical childhood and a family struggling against a weight of medical ignorance, The Boy Who Went Away is “shockingly, electrically alive” (Phillip Lopate). It is also an indispensable bookend to Gottlieb’s Best Boy, which recounts the impact of autism on the same family from the other side, many years later, in the voice of a middle-aged autistic man.

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Review

Set in the suburbs of New Jersey in the summer of 1967, The Boy Who Went Away is a skilled debut novel that tells the story of one boy's maturation and the change a single summer visits on his troubled family. Denny is a sneak who begins the story playing domestic spy: listening in on phone conversations, steaming open the mail, and interloping on his mother, father, and his autistic brother, Fad. His Eddy Haskell of a friend Derwent helps usher Denny into an adolescent world of sex and irresponsible actions, and his spying uncovers a set of circumstances that teach him even more about adult life, namely his mother's infidelity and the looming institutionalization of his brother, who is prone to rocking in place and uttering comments like, "I want to be a wooden world that stays in one place so I can touch it whenever I want to." Together, the combination of his mother's love, his father's wits, and the simple love of a bothersome brother creates a moving story about the basic components of family life. The youthful prankishness and frank language keep the story moving and honest, and the book perfectly captures the way a single summer changes and seasons a young man's life.

From the Inside Flap

aubart, the chaotic summer of 1967, when the screams of napalm bombs on the nightly news drowned out the cheers of the All-Star game, brings the painful realization that childhood has passed. while engaging in his favorite domestic spying game, Denny unwittingly discovers the desperate measures his mother will take to save his autistic older brother, Fad, who is lost in the diagnostic Dark Ages of the 1960s. At the heart of this novel is not only the story of Denny's coltish entrance to adolescence, but also that of his relationship with Fad, which will be forever changed during the course of that summer at 44 Drainer Drive. This is the cruelly antic, heartrending story of two childhoods that would, by fall's arrival, be irretrievably lost.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1631490923
• ISBN 13: 9781631490927
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256