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Résumé
Résumé
After a devastating revelation, a father and son journey across a tapestry of towns in award-winning author Jesse Ball's thought-provoking novel Census . When a widower learns he doesn't have long left to live, he wonders who will care for his adult son whom he fiercely loves--a son with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind and a desire to see the country, the man becomes a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and takes his son on the trip. Traveling into the country, through towns named only by ascending letters of the alphabet, father and 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. Pressing 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 confronts 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. "A vital testament to selfless love; a psalm to commonplace miracles; and a mysterious evolving metaphor. So kind, it aches." --David Mitchell "[Jesse Ball] has combined Kafka's paranoia with Whitman's earnest American grain to found a fictional kingdom of genial doom and melancholia." -- New York Times "Truly otherworldly writing in the best ways that Borges and Calvino have shown to be possible." -- Forbes
Critiques (2)
Critique du New York Review of Books
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.
Critique du Library Journal
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.
