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Summary
Summary
NAMED A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2018 BY
The New York Times * Buzzfeed * Esquire * Nylon * The Boston Globe * The Huffington Post * The Chicago Tribune * The Rumpus * The AV Club * Southern Living * The Millions * The Chicago Reader * Kirkus * Publishers Weekly * NPR
A powerful and moving new novel from an award-winning, acclaimed author: in the wake of a devastating revelation, a father and son journey north across a tapestry of towns
When a widower receives notice from a doctor that he doesn't have long left to live, he is struck by the question of who will care for his adult son--a son whom he fiercely loves, a boy with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind, and with a desire to see the country on one last trip, the man signs up as a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and leaves town with his son.
Traveling into the country, through towns named only by ascending letters of the alphabet, the man and his son encounter a wide range of human experience. While some townspeople welcome them into their homes, others who bear the physical brand of past censuses on their ribs are wary of their presence. When they press toward the edges of civilization, the landscape grows wilder, and the towns grow farther apart and more blighted by industrial decay. As they approach "Z," the man must confront a series of questions: What is the purpose of the census? Is he complicit in its mission? And just how will he learn to say good-bye to his son?
Mysterious and evocative, Census is a novel about free will, grief, the power of memory, and the ferocity of parental love, from one of our most captivating young writers.
Author Notes
Jesse Ball was born in Port Jefferson, New York on June 7, 1978. He received a bachelor's degree from Vassar College and an MFA from Columbia University. His novels include Samedi the Deafness, Silence Once Begun, A Cure for Suicide, and How to Set a Fire and Why. His poem, Speech in a Chamber, was chosen for the anthology The Best American Poetry 2006. He won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp, and Carr.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ball's latest (after How to Set a Fire and Why) is an intensely moving and dazzlingly imagined journey of a dying father and his disabled adult son as they make their way through a sometimes recognizable yet ultimately mysterious terrain. The unnamed father, a widower, narrates the novel as he travels with his son as a census taker for an obscure governmental agency, entering the homes of strangers and marking them with a tattoo on their ribs to indicate that they have been counted. For the narrator, the census is both a reckoning with the human world that he is about to leave behind and a way of saying goodbye to his son by finally taking the trip across the country that he and his late wife had often spoken of. As they head toward Z, the ultimate destination, their encounters with others along the way reveal the beautiful yet brutal range of human experience. A brief preface to the novel reveals that Ball's older brother, who had Down syndrome, died at a young age, and the novel is an effort to create a portrait of the person he had been through the eyes of his caretaker, a role the young Ball imagined eventually inhabiting. This novel is a devastatingly powerful call for understanding and compassion. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Ball (How to Set a Fire and Why, 2016) writes subtly speculative and haunting novels shaped by visions of societies run aground and bureaucracies run amok. In sync with Italo Calvino, Paul Auster, and Howard Norman, Ball takes a matter-of-fact approach to surreal situations, which he deepens with finely rendered and realistic thoughts and emotions. His latest mysterious, mesmerizing, and insightful fairy tale is an imaginative and tender tribute to his late brother, who had Down syndrome. The metaphysically minded narrator, a surgeon, was happily married to a clown famous for her audacious and unsettling performances. They cared for their Down syndrome son with radiant attunement and joy until her unexpected death. Now terminally ill himself, the doctor becomes a census taker so that he can spend his last days traveling the stark countryside with his beloved son. But this is no simple, information-gathering process; instead, it involves obtaining the quintessence of each individual and marking them with a tattoo. Each strange, touch-and-go encounter on their poignant and demanding journey reveals the contrariness of human nature, especially as people respond to the unusual boy. Ball's mind-bending, gorgeously well told, and profoundly moving fable celebrates a father's love for his son, whose quintessence is to inspire people to be their better selves.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CENSUS, by Jesse Ball. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) A fatally ill father travels across the country with his adult son, who has Down syndrome. There are flashes of surrealism and melancholy - the man works for a shadowy census bureau, and brands the people he meets on their ribs after their encounters - but "there is rapture, too, and compassion and the consolations of storytelling," our critic Parul Sehgal wrote. THE FIGHTERS: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, by CJ. Chivers. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) Chivers, a writer for The Times and a Marine veteran, dives into the on-the-ground experiences of the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our reviewer, Robert D. Kaplan, called it "a classic of war reporting," writing that it "could be the most powerful indictment yet of America's recent Middle East wars." SNAP, by Belinda Bauer. (Grove, $16.) The hero of this taut thriller is Jack, who as a teenager had to step up and raise his sisters after their mother's disappearance. When he discovers a talent for burglary, he begins breaking into homes, leaving his community rattled by the "Goldilocks" thief. Separately, a pregnant woman is taunted by her stalker, and a detective involved in both cases neatly ties up the stories. THERE ARE NO GROWN-UPS: A Midlife Comingof-Age Story, by Pamela Druckerman. (Penguin, $17.) The author, an American writer based in France known for her book "Bringing Up Bébé," details her long-dreaded shift from "mademoiselle" to "madame." She's candid about her expectations ("I've entered the stage of life where you don't need to be beautiful; simply by being well-preserved and not obese, I would now pass for pretty"); where they fell short; and what she learned, about life and herself, along the way. THE FEMALE PERSUASION, by Meg Wolitzer. (Riverhead, $17.) Wolitzer's 12th novel takes up the subject of intergenerational feminism, told through the story of a young woman and her entry into the women's movement. As a college student, Greer encounters Faith Frank, a charismatic celebrity-activist loosely modeled on Gloria Steinem. When Faith invites Greer into her inner orbit, everything Greer thought she'd ever wanted is called into question. THE SOUL OF AMERICA: The Battle for Our Better Angels, by Jon Meacham. (Random House, $20.) Unnerved by the Trump presidency, white nationalist rallies and other developments, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian revisits moments when liberal values ultimately triumphed over fear and division - among them Reconstruction, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the era of McCarthyism.
Guardian Review
A father and his son with Downs syndrome go on a road trip in this remarkable novel about the nature of empathy Two very different literary impulses collide in Jesse Balls new novel: old-fashioned memoir and modernist fable. One might think they were incompatible, given their allegiances to the separate truths of experience and imagination, but its a testament to the skill of this talented writer (on the Granta best young American novelists list in 2017) that they end up enhancing each other in all kinds of unexpected, often remarkable ways. An opening note states the authors intention to write about his brother, Abram Ball, who had Downs syndrome, and whose life (he died aged 24) was something so tremendous, so full of light, that I thought I must write a book that helps people to see what it is like to know and love a Downs syndrome boy or girl. Family photos at the end imply that this is not some metafictional gambit. The same note explains an authorial decision that, since Ball grew up thinking of himself as a caretaker figure to his brother, he will recast the fraternal relationship as one of father and son. It seems a modest change, promising a judicious measure of artfulness while suggesting the story isnt going to stray far from reality, much less from realism itself. So its a surprise to find oneself, a few pages later, plunged into a high-concept fable about a dying census taker and his son driving through a country as surreally like and unlike America as the land of Kafkas Amerika, on a mission that has more in common with the metaphysical investigations of Becketts tramps and Rilkes angels than anything youd find under What we do on the US Census Bureaus website. As with anything original, Census takes getting used to. Its written very idiosyncratically. Unlike the austere verbal neutrality of the Kafka stories it otherwise resembles, it cultivates a folksy, whimsical style that can cloy. Some phrasing sounds like pastiche Thoreau: I have often triedto look through the eyes of those who find in the most familiar things an endless reverie. And youd have to have a very sweet tooth to enjoy some of the loftier rhetorical moments: Is there none who can simply wander alone beneath a sort of cloth tent painted with dreams? There are figures who seem to have stepped from a Wes Anderson movie, a Tolkien novel or a Bruno Schultz short story? Im not sure the voice ever won me over entirely, but I found myself able to accept it, or ignore it, as I got absorbed in the storys larger inventions. Theres the initially perplexing but (as it turns out) precisely imagined matter of what it means to be a census taker in this universe. Not to give too much away, we come to understand it as a kind of redemptive and transformative witnessing of peoples lives. Underlying it is the Socratic dictum about the unexamined life not being worth living, along with the scriptural idea of the recording angel who notes our every thought and deed. It sounds a bit solemn, perhaps, but its done with a light touch and a resourceful sense of drama. And theres the basic fascination of the interviewees. Like any good road novel, Census is at one level a gallery of quickly sketched encounters, and among the books pleasures are the characters who open their doors to this itinerant father and son. Theres a sinister detective, a thumbless doctor at a fantastical rope factory, a hipster puzzle maker, an alarming nymphomaniac and her even more alarming sister. There are figures who seem to have stepped from a Wes Anderson movie, a Tolkien novel, a Bruno Schultz short story and Greil Marcus s old, weird America. Theyre all vividly rendered, often with wonderfully macabre or bizarre stories in their background, and advance a sustained philosophical inquiry into the nature and limits of human empathy, specifically in the way they relate to the son. Its with the son that the element of lived experience enters the story most poignantly. Vignettes that crystallise the boys touching (often very funny) way of looking at things crop up as scenes or memories throughout the book, adding the tang of observed reality to its more speculative qualities. Here are the father and son approaching a house: I wanted to pass it by, but my son insisted. Why did he insist? I think it was because there was a round window in the face of the house. And here they are after the son has had a turn at the wheel: He said this after driving the car: now I am a driver. I said, yes, but dont drive the car without me. He said you dont drive the car without me. You dont have to have any particular interest in Downs syndrome to connect with this aspect of the book: it isnt a polemic about special needs, but a detailed and moving portrayal of a kind of radical innocence, one that brings both the cruelty and the kindness in the world around it into sharp focus. For me, it was the most powerful of the many surprises in this unusual, impressive novel. - James Lasdun.
Kirkus Review
A terminally ill widower and his son set off on a final journey to see the country.After a jarring but welcome stylistic break in his last novel (How to Set a Fire and Why, 2016), Ball returns to his spare philosophical style, employed here to portray a man with Down syndrome in tribute to the author's late brother. The narrator is this man's father, a widowed doctor who has recently learned that he has a heart condition that will be fatal. In lieu of simply succumbing to his illness, the doctor accepts a job as a census taker for a mysterious government entity that has him interviewing and subsequently tattooing its country's citizens, spread across regions designated from A to Z. It's a peculiar mission with equally outlandish instructions like "A census taker must above all attempt, even long for, blankness," and "Never expect help from anyone. There is no help for you." Along the way, the two men encounter strangers of all sorts, some fearful, some odd, and some with deep compassion for the census taker and his charge. About halfway to Z, the census taker abdicates his responsibility and creates his own mission: "I, who have in some ways always misbehaved, even as a surgeon, would misbehave going forward, I decided. I would go into each house and home, each town and village, and try to discover what was worthy of note." Written in stark, unembellished prose, the story is permeated by an undeniable sense of loss. We learn about the doctor's late wife, an avant-garde performing artist, and we learn about the man himself, even as he prepares to leave this life. But the boy is largely absent. As Ball notes in an opening statement, it's a "hollow" story with a lost boy at the center of it, the tale wrapped around him like a protective cloak.An ethereal meditation on love, the duty of a caretaker, and mortality. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Ball (How To Set a Fire and Why) here offers a quietly epic work. The narrator, a widower aware that he is dying from a heart condition, decides to travel through an unnamed country with his adult son to help take the census. From reading the preface, we understand the son has Down syndrome, though this isn't explicitly stated. The father's plan is that he will die along the way and send his son home by train to a friend he trusts. The census-taking involves tattooing each person counted on a particular rib, and as the story moves along, each visit to a new location is replete with human insights and additional details about the narrator's life. (E.g., he was a surgeon, and his wife was a famous mime.) With the narrator's health continuing to decline, more truths are revealed until ultimately the son must leave the narrator to face death alone. VERDICT Focusing on how to protect our own after we are gone in the face of ignorance, cruelty, and disregard, this work combines a travel adventure with a meditation on human kindness to create a deeply perceptive work of essential truths. Highly recommended for all readers. [See Prepub Alert, 10/9/17.]-Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.