Finding Brendan

The world of Brendan, a teenager with Down's Syndrome, collapses when his mother dies, his father fails him, and he is left in an institution, struggling to control his own life

Eighteen-year-old Brendan Flynn is institutionalized after an abusive school principal decides that he's "disruptive." Brendan is retarded, and even his protective father, a widower who runs a store 15 hours a day, can't rescue the youth from the state-operated community home where "behavior modification therapy" means putting residents in solitary confinement or forcing them to sit around naked as punishment. This beautiful, wrenching novel raises important questions about how society responds to those who are different. Brendan's romance with fellow patient Beatrice Dove, who joins him as a fugitive, makes for a touching love story with surprise comic touches. O'Conner ( Stealing Home ) advances the plot in the alternating voices of a score of motley characters, including an empathetic special-education teacher, authoritarian administrators, homeless people, a trucker with mob contacts and a battle-scarred Vietnam vet.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A thesis novel is wrecked by the author's sentimentality and by excessive zeal in trying to show that the retarded are almost always better off outside institutions. O'Conner (Stealing Home, 1979; Defending Civilization, 1988) begins well enough by depicting a winning and believable retarded youth, 18-year-old Brendan, who speaks in two- or three-word sentences and likes to be called ``Boombah.'' It is only at the end of the book that the author pulls the rug out from under his creation by revealing, in Brendan's interior monologue, the surprising but unexplained fact that he thinks like a sophisticated, mature man using polysyllabic words and lengthy sentences. The entire novel is narrated in the first person in different voices by 22 separate individuals, all but four of whom are given only one chance to tell their part of the story. The exceptions are Brendan's teacher, Sarah; his widower father, Joseph; his girlfriend, Beatrice; a power-hungry organizational man, Tucker, who wants Brendan for his community house project; and a Runyonesque gang chieftain, Salvatore, who serves as a deus ex machina. In summary, Brendan annoys a high-school principal by hanging around the school, then escapes from a vandalism charge by hanging out with homeless people, is caught and railroaded to a community house that's rife with behavior-modification despotism and numbing drugs, and where the ``craftsroom'' is a punishment cell in disguise. From this Dickensian milieu he elopes with a beautiful girl to honeymoon on an island where the two hope to start their own country. The one person who advocates placing the retarded in homes because her own childhood was ruined by her parents' undivided devotion to her retarded brother is made completely unsympathetic. O'Conner's third may have its heart in the right place, but readers will grow out of patience with its mushiness. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

O'Connor, whose first novel Stealing Home ( LJ 3/1/79) was a National Book Award finalist, has missed the mark with this novel. Brendan Flynn, an 18-year-old Down's syndrome child struggling to adjust to life after the death of his mother, runs away rather than be institutionalized. As each of the people Brendan encounters in his flight and capture present a perspective on his disability, many characteristics of Down's syndrome are revealed, while equal numbers of misconceptions and prejudices against the retarded are exposed. O'Connor has a thorough grasp of his topic, and the development of many of his characters is exquisite, but he has not maintained his distance. By getting too caught up in his mission, he has painted the conflict of good and evil--Brendan versus authority--with much too broad a brush. In so doing, the impact of his story has been overshadowed by efforts to drive his point home.
- Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.