Full disclosure: my boyfriend met Liz Moore at a film screening a few years ago, and his ongoing acquaintanceship with her (which included the three of us having lunch together one day this summer) is what prompted me to check this book out from the library—I’m not sure I would ever have found it otherwise. And even if I had found it, I’m not sure if the flap copy would have inspired me to read it: the description of the book as a “memorable, heartbreaking, and ultimately redemptive novel about finding sustenance and friendship in the most surprising places” made me fear it would be sentimental. But my boyfriend said he thought I’d like it, and he knows my taste pretty well. Sure enough: I liked this book a whole lot.
Heft is narrated in part by Arthur Opp, a former academic who guesses he weighs between 500 and 600 pounds and who hasn’t left his Brooklyn home for ten years (since 9/11), and in part by Kel Keller, the teenage son of a former student of Arthur’s named Charlene. The very start of the book is a letter Arthur starts writing to Charlene, telling her about his current life and apologizing for what he’s omitted to tell her in the previous letters he’s written to her (his weight, his lack of a job, his reclusive state): it’s prompted by a phone call he got from her three days earlier, in which she said she would send him a letter. The letter, though, turns out not to be a letter at all: it’s a photograph of Kel, which is then followed by another phone call from Charlene. Kel needs help with college applications, Charlene says: all he thinks about is baseball. Charlene suggests that she and Kel could visit Arthur, a possibility that’s exciting and worrying to him: no one’s been in his house in seven years. So he hires a cleaning service, and a maid named Yolanda arrives, and her presence in Arthur’s life is better for him than he expected: she doesn’t just clean, she’s someone to talk with; she’s someone who can convince him to talk, and who will listen.
Kel, meanwhile, lives in Yonkers but goes to school in a wealthier suburb where his mom used to work; he’s basically raising himself as best he can because his dad left when he was four, and his mom is dealing with problems of her own (she also, it seems, does not really leave the house). Kel is athletic and popular but also lonely; he’s a kid from a poor neighborhood who goes to a school of privileged kids, and he’s aware of his difference. He likes baseball and is very good at it; he thinks maybe baseball will be what changes his life and his mom’s life, if he can get into the majors instead of going to college.
Things happen, and it’s hard to say anything about any of them without being spoiler-y (while this is largely a character-driven book, it’s also a plot-driven book), and people write letters and read letters and are lonely, or have moments of connection, or both. I like the way this book is written, the occasional formality of Arthur’s voice and the ease of Kel’s, and the details that make each of those voices feel right, like when Kel is driving down a pretty street and there’s this: “There’s a horse farm to my right and I watch a woman open and close a fence behind her and call to one of them. The blanketed horse comes to her and she clips a leash-thing onto his face-thing and then the two of them walk toward the barn” (208). I also really liked the ending (like, so much so that I read it and then stopped and handed the book to my boyfriend and told him to read the last paragraph, because it felt so good and right), though if reviews on Goodreads are representative, I am apparently in the minority—a lot of people apparently really hated the end. (It’s an inconclusive ending, which felt right to me for the book and for the characters: it ends at a threshold, with possibility and uncertainty, rather than with some climactic scene.)
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