The love of two imperfect people

By Rachel Simon

Grand Central Publishing.

346 pp. $24.99

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Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

Readers of Rachel Simon's fiction know that she's a hopeful romantic.

In her stories, a widow dreams her lost husband back into reality, a young woman heals broken people with sex, a mother preserves a moment of joy by capturing her daughters' breath in a jar. Her work is smart and laced with sweetness, presenting an optimistic view even when her subject matter is bleak.

It's a perspective Simon achieves, in part, by taking an unexpected angle on her subject - and subjects. She brings an anthropologist's eye to her stories, describing characters, action, and emotion as if she were new to the weary world.

This approach works especially well in her latest novel, The Story of Beautiful Girl, the love story of Lynnie, a developmentally disabled woman, and Homan, a deaf and mute man, who meet as residents of the Pennsylvania State School for the Incurable and Feebleminded. By seeing anew what comes naturally to most of us - cognition, memory, hearing, speech - Simon illuminates her characters' interior lives and finds new and forgotten meaning in familiar symbols.

Memory, for Lynnie, is a locker filled with saved treasures: a toy horse, a red feather, clothing that once fit her "small self." Homan still thinks in the Southern drawl he spoke before a fever changed his hearing, though now he can only feel music as thumping inside the stereo speakers. Through Lynnie's and Homan's eyes, a lighthouse isn't merely a quaint nautical ruin or a decorative motif. It's a literal beacon for two people who believe in its power to save them.

On a rainy November night in 1968, widow Martha Zimmer takes in Lynnie and Homan, who have run away from the State School a few miles away. They're traveling with Lynnie's newborn daughter, whose paternity they must keep secret. Lynnie may not understand time as chronology, but she does have a clear sense of cause and effect. Her friend Tonette has died "accidentally" after confiding to a nurse at the school, "Things happen here that shouldn't."

Not speaking for different reasons, Lynnie and Homan have silently named each other; their bond is sealed with this sacred act. Homan calls Lynnie "Beautiful Girl" and she calls him "Buddy," thereby restoring identity to this African American John Doe the institution has labeled "Forty-two." Their lives are joined by love and circumstance; Homan helped dig Tonette's grave, and he delivered Lynnie's baby.

Drawn to a lighthouse image on the mailbox, the fugitive couple choose their safe house well. Martha, a retired teacher, has nurtured generations of students, though her only son (dismissed by her doctor as "defective") died at birth. A second chance at parenting suddenly presents itself when police capture Lynnie (and Homan escapes). This time, Martha must call upon her far-flung "children" to reciprocate - with gifts of baby clothing, shelter, and lessons in feeding, diapering, and raising the baby girl she's promised to protect. Simon cleverly subverts the idea of mothering as "natural," depicting Martha struggling to learn from her students on the alien planet of new parenthood.

So begins Martha's 40-year chronicle of Julia's life: "In case I am not around to tell you, here is how you began in the world." The narrative gains power as it's braided with Homan's search for his lost love and Lynnie's journey to self-advocacy, aided by a compassionate social worker named Kate. Simon artfully controls a narrative that is experienced by these characters as nonlinear: impressions anchored by a memory of the Day of the Red Feather, when Lynnie and Homan fell in love. With Kate's help, Lynnie eventually grasps that pictures arranged in a sequence tell a story - her story: what happened to her to cause the internal changes she's experienced.

"If the perfection of this baby's face might be construed as proof of the divine," Martha wonders, "what did the imperfection of a handicapped body or mind prove? Did it argue against the existence of a larger power, as [her deceased husband] felt after they'd buried their son?"

Unschooled in organized religion, Homan understands that any story implies a creator. But it's his stint living with a faith healer that strengthens his own healing faith that he'll be reunited with Beautiful Girl.

The novel's resolution is unexpected and satisfying, allowing for empathy with Lynnie's conflicted family, who "put her away." Simon's thorough research, detailed in an author's note, is evident in her careful crafting of this moving story. Those readers familiar with her insightful memoir, Riding the Bus With My Sister, will find this new fictional work an opportune meeting of author and material.