Falling Boy
By Allison McGhee
Picador, 208 pages, $13 paper
Adults in Allison McGhee’s oddly affecting novel “Falling Boy” often have names, bestowed by children, that both define and dismiss them: the Figurehead, the old guy, Big, the teacher, Kilt Man. The prickly 9-year-old girl and two teenage boys who are the novel’s focus have real names, and fantasy names they step into and out of like blue jeans, and deliberate personas they present to a world each is desperate to reconstruct as a place of safety and absolution.
Inhabiting this province of the young are Joseph, a 16-year-old new to life in a wheelchair; Zap, a charming storyteller who braids his “wild hair, hair of honey and gold and brown, hair that wanted to play”; and the girl, Enzo, who storms through each day “clinched, anger shimmering out.” The three lives intersect in summertime in a Minneapolis bakery where Zap and Joseph work and Enzo stations herself like a miniature gargoyle/investigative reporter.
Joseph, whose father also works at the bakery, has been brought to Minnesota from upstate New York to live after an accident that separated him from his mother and put him in a wheelchair. Both Zap and Enzo set about getting the truth about all that Joseph has lost. Watching his way with the bees that come to the bakery to sip lemonade, and sometimes to drown, Zap weaves stories for bakery customers about Joseph as a superhero, injured in an act of valor:
” ‘The beekeeper is a hero because he risked life and limb to rescue his mother from a fate worse than death,’ Zap said. ‘She was stranded on a precipice, and with no thought to his own safety, the beekeeper crept out onto thin air. . . . All hail the beekeeper. . . . All hail the Joseph, the beekeeper from the island of bees.’ “
Enzo, who adopts “Mighty Thor” as her alter-ego, prefers daily interrogations, in which only the answers she wants to hear are acceptable.
The power of narrative — the stories we tell (and continually revise) to survive — is central to “Falling Boy.” Joseph moves through the novel holding off Enzo and Zap’s questions, navigating their animosity toward each other, swimming at an ancient gym, wheeling himself around the lake, even flirting with a beautiful girl whose little brother is damaged. All of it brings him closer to the moments when he will admit to himself what is true. In the process, the history that separates Enzo and Zap is also revealed, as is some adult culpability. But what matters, in the novel’s intricate construction of truths and necessary fictions, is what the young will do with their own stories, which, like superpowers, can be used to build or to destroy.
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Lynna Williams, a short-story writer, teaches at Emory University.
