{"id":863,"date":"2016-05-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-28T22:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=863"},"modified":"2025-01-01T15:22:21","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T02:22:21","slug":"shtum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2016\/05\/21\/shtum\/","title":{"rendered":"Shtum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jem Lester<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Orion\/Hachette<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, May 21st 2016<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Popular media is not short on stories about individuals at various points along the autism spectrum with \u2018special talents\u2019 that compensate for (or are the price of) their condition. Far fewer deal with the realities of living with and loving somebody who may never progress beyond the social and emotional level of a pre-verbal child. For parents faced with this reality, including Shtum\u2019s<\/em> author, \u2018romanticised\u2019 fictional accounts such as Rainman <\/em>or The Rosie Projec<\/em>t can seem a direct negation of their daily existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ben Jewell, the novel\u2019s narrator, is one such father. With his marriage and his business both disintegrating, he and his profoundly autistic son, Jonah, have moved back in with his father in an attempt to convince the powers that be that Jonah needs to attend a specialist residential school.  Although his wife initially described this relocation as a temporary arrangement, it soon becomes clear that not only is the separation permanent, she is also handed all responsibility for fighting (and paying for) the specialist care their son needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But rather than face reality, Ben prefers to leave his father take over Jonah\u2019s care and lose himself in drink. Then his father is diagnosed with a fast-moving and untreatable cancer and Ben, who has never finished anything in his life, is forced speak for his son, the one person who truly needs him. And in giving Jonah the voice he does not have, Ben also realises his son communicates more in his silence than he, with all his words, ever can.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What stands out most vividly in the novel is the immense difficulty of caring for Jonah. Ben\u2019s guilt, grief, anger, frustration, fear and fatigue are juxtaposed against moments of calmness, laughter, or reciprocated affection that are all the more precious for their rarity, but which cannot compensate for the complications that surround every aspect of daily life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Less successful is the other thread of the story, which deals with Ben\u2019s relationship with his own father, a Polish Jew who refuses to talk about his past and clearly regards his only child as useless. These sections are less convincing and, I felt, unnecessary. Shtum<\/em> is the product of a MA novel writing course, and I can\u2019t help wondering if this part of the story-arc, with its carefully constructed alternative father-son dyad and revelatory conclusion, was constructed to ensure the novel conforms to accepted conventions of structure and character development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think Jonah\u2019s story is strong enough to stand alone as an honest account of a situation that is seldom talked about and an example of why sometimes letting go can be as an act of both survival and of love. It is also a stinging indictment of a social system that looks for the cheapest possible solution to a complex problem rather than providing the support which children like Jonah and their families need and deserve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.odt.co.nz\/entertainment\/books\/reality-autism-depicted<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jem Lester
\n
\nOtago Daily Times review May 21st 2016<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[248,370,251,18],"class_list":["post-863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-248","tag-fiction","tag-jem-lester","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1798,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions\/1798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}