A fictional small town opens with ghosts rising as mist over rye, then follows Hai 19 at midnight in childhood and far from first light. Instead of drowning himself, Hai crosses a bridge and is adopted by Grazina, an 82-year-old woman with midstage prefrontal lobe dementia. Grazina lives on a street called the Devil’s Armpit, takes 14 pills daily, and eats Stouffer’s Salisbury Steak. Hai becomes her carer and her proxy grandson, while she provides support in a difficult life. They invent a role-playing game to reduce hallucinations and panic. While she sleeps, Hai searches her cupboards for prescription medicines. The story connects themes of self-invention, fiction’s uses, and escape from parental experience.
"It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai 19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light preparing to drown himself."
"Instead of jumping from the bridge, Hai crosses it, to be adopted on the other side by 82-year-old Grazina, a woman suffering midstage prefrontal lobe dementia. He will become her proxy grandson; they will be each other's support in a crap world. It will be a disordered but productive relationship."
"Between them they invent a role-playing game to bring her down from the destabilising hallucinations and insomniac panics of her disease. Then, as she sleeps, he quietly ransacks her cupboards for prescription medicines. This is a huge novel in terms of where it directs our attention: from gay self-discovery to the uses of fiction."
"It's heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time. M John Harrison 8.49 (RRP 9.99) purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Katabasis RF Kuang In Katabasis, hell is not a roiling pit of fire, it's worse: Hell is a campus."
Read at www.theguardian.com
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