Heft - Liz Moore

'I would remind myself of how many people there were like me, & how many people fall into the despair of loneliness...'

This is a review where I have to be careful not to be over the top, because, plainly said, I loved this book so, so much.

Arthur Opp, at around 550 pounds, is extremely overweight, and he hasn't left his large home in Brooklyn in ten years. He was an academic, but no longer works, supporting himself through money from a father he never sees, and ordering everything from food to books online and having it all delivered to his door. He tells us his home was once 'very lovely inside and out', but has now fallen 'into a sort of haunted disrepair', and he hasn't seen the upper floors in a decade. His only real friendship, since his friend Marty passed away, is an infrequent correspondence with an ex-student of his, Charlene Turner, and the novel commences with a frank letter that he is composing to her. 

Kel Keller is a talented baseball player in his last year of highschool. His mother, Charlene, wants him to consider college, but he is not academically minded and is instead aiming for a place with a major league team straight out of school. His life isn't the seemingly easy, privileged existence of his fellow students at Pells Landing. He lives in Yonkers, and commutes to the prestigious school everyday, having a place there only because his mother used to work there. But his mother not only no longer works, she can no longer cope with life, and spends her days drunk for the most part, something which Kel has had to live with, and hide. Charlene writes to her old acquaintance Arthur Opp, asking if maybe he could advise her son Kel about colleges. 

The story is told alternately by Arthur and Kel, both of whom are endearing and wonderful voices. Arthur and Charlene connected as two lonely souls. She told him once how she felt she was invisible. He tells us 'I am one of the world's lonely', and that he 'felt destined for solitude' right from the beginning of his life, before then even, he was 'very certain that one day it would find me, so when it did I was not surprised & even welcomed it.' He has ways of consoling himself, through food especially, and has imagined that there is 'an oversoul of loneliness', a way that all those who are lonely in the world are somehow connected, and there is a reason for it.

'There was a delicious romance in being utterly alone, & I told myself I was nobler for it, & that there was a purpose to my solitude, O there must be.'

Liz Moore has captured how loneliness feels. How a person can withdraw from the world and years can pass by, spent in this solitude. In Arthur and Kel, she has created two wonderful, damaged, loveable characters whose lives are gradually drawn closer together through the strand that connects them; the life of one woman, herself lonely and destroyed. Slowly, their lives begin to shift. The appearance in Arthur's life of Yolanda signifies his first real contact with the outside world for a long time. An unlikely but wonderful friendship begins.

Meanwhile, the huge change in his life, partway through the story, takes Kel full circle, sees him spiralling down into despair, and leaves him longing 'to collapse into myself until I no longer exist, I want to live in my mother's house and never go out.' This passage sounds like Arthur. Kel wants to isolate himself from the world now. Are these two very different people actually rather alike? What has happened to make Kel feel this way? What will happen to them both?

The story moves along beautifully, it gripped me from the very start; it has surprises for us along the way, and is enjoyable and very poignant. I felt that the author really cared about these characters. It is a story filled with sadness and hope, and told in an intimate, warmhearted way. I loved, cared about, rooted for and was thoroughly convinced by Arthur and Kel and their lives throughout.

Thank you for a really brilliant book Liz Moore. The characters have stayed with me, and this story is certainly in my top reads of the year so far. 

Published by Hutchinson.


5/5

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