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Proper Respect for a Wound

by Lindsay Boyd

224 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-2547; ISBN 1-4120-4739-0; US$21.00, C$23.83, EUR17.50, £12.00

Where feelings of perceived hurt and woundedness are taken too far, offers of healing meet rejection. Proper Respect for a Wound examines the consequences of such a scenario.

About the Book

Where feelings of perceived hurt and woundedness are taken too far, offers of healing meet rejection. Proper Respect for a Wound examines the consequences of such a scenario.

About the Author

Lindsay Boyd hails from Melbourne, Australia. He is a writer and care worker. Proper Respect for a Wound, his second novel in a trilogy dealing with the themes of hearing and reconciliation, follows The Unintentional Healing of Soul. He is currently at work on the third novel of the series.

Excerpts

Reviews

"Anyone who has been paying attention to recent trends in television is aware that an ever-greater chunk of airtime has been dedicated to what is now known as reality television. While there have been many variants of this genre in the past few years, the immediate common ancestor of most of them is MTV's The Real World. Beginning in the early 1990s in New York, The Real World's producers had assembled a "cast" of attractive and diverse twenty-soemthings, placed them in upscale real estate, and filmed their interactions. Whether of not the end product, mediated by extensive editing and constricted by a half-hour format, is art is highly debatable, but the commercial success of this kind of program suggests that they are popular. One of the more compelling features of most reality programming —something pioneered by The Real World— is that the producers of these shows often allow individual participants to vent their fears and frustrations to the audience. As confidantes, the audience can better see themselves as participating in the "real" world playing itself out on their television screens. This confessional-within-ensemble method has a great deal of potential in fiction, though it has not been extensively explored. Lindsay Boyd's novel Proper Respect for a Wound, however, finds the artistic potential and cultural currency of the personal confessional and crafts a tale that will lead his audience to identify with the disabled and their caregivers. In this novel, plot is secondary to setting and to characterization, just as in reality television, but it nevertheless opens up an important window into a segment of real life that is often ignored.

Since the strength of Boyd's novel is in tis ability to create vivid characters though letting them reveal their inner selves to his audience, we should discuss them in order of their appearance. We fist meet Delgado, a resident of a community for the disabled in the Dominican republic. Though aware of his relative good fortune in a country that has slender resources to devote to any social programs, Delgado displays a refreshing candor about using his disability to keep other emotionally distant. When reminiscing about begging with his mother, he notes that he "could neither walk —no one would have guessed the part unwillingness played in the scenario—nor talk." Yet even though he "understood the comments people directed" at him "from their enormous heights," he "elected to respond in a language home-brewed, with a signature tune of grunts, yelps, and squeals." Delgado perfects this language over time until, as he note, it "communicated all I wished to convey" (p. 3,4). Delgado had other strategies for controlling his environment, admitting that sometimes he wet his "pants at the workshop out of willful bloody-mindedness" (p. 43). In Delgado, Boyd presents us with a portrait of the disabled that is three dimensional. He is not a hero or an angel, nor is he a cartoon. He is a grumpy, caustic, yet ultimately sympathetic person.

The next character Boyd allows to communicate with readers is Juan, who we meet while he is working with Delgado. Juan quickly leaves to work in a community in Mobile, Alabama for six months. With Juan, and later Daniela, Proper Respect for a Wound becomes more like reality television. In these sections, the residents of the care facility are relegated to the background and the interaction between the caregivers becomes the central focus. Of course, this is all good gossipy fun, a sort of Real World Mobile, featuring caregivers instead of chic layabouts, but it lacks the profound insight of Delgado's portrayal. Nevertheless, most of the time it is easy to care about Juan, an articulate and sensitive person who is attractive to both men and women and yet is mysteriously unattached. Occasionally, howe er, Juan's section catalogs his reactions to living in the United States and begins to seem like a slightly dull letter home to his family. These passages tend to slow down the otherwise crisp pace of Boyd's narrative. For example, when Juan discusses a painting that impresses hi, he notes that "the artist's tender, unadorned depictions of the plants, animal life, and people of the Gulf Coast region moved" him because the artist "portrayed them in watercolors, drawings oils, block prints, ceramics, and carvings" (p. 61). Clearly, Boyd needs to refrain from slipping into the idiom of the tourist's guide, but fortunately these digressions are rare.

Daniela, an attractive twenty-something college student from Jena in the former East Germany, has the floor next. Her inner thoughts are presented as journal entries. As with Juan, Daniela mostly discussed the personalities of the care facility and her impressions of America. Things become interesting when open-minded and secular Daniela realizes that she may or may not have feelings for Juan, who may or may not have feelings for her. They hang out after hours in her apartment, discussing the other residents, the difficulty of communicating in a second language, and Daniel's boyfriend, Albert. Again, there is nothing profound here, though it does make for entertaining reading. Her indecision over what to do about her boyfriend in Germany provides much voyeuristic pleasure, for example. And both Jan and Daniela help to humanize caregivers and make that career appealing. As with Juan, however, Boyd occasionally has Daniela sound more like Frommer's guide to the former Warsaw Pack countries than an actual person. For example, she writes in one of her letters that "everyone who resides in Jena knows, the walkway beneath the regional history museum leads to the Gothic Stadtkirche St. Michel and the original engraved tombstone of the reformer, Martin Luther" (p.139). But she is communicating to Katrina, who would know this, and Boyd's desire to inform readers about Jena leads him to make Daniela sound like an annoying prig who talks down to her friend. Not only is this out of line with Boyd's overall characterization, but it also slows down the story's pace.

The novel then returns to another satisfyingly complex disabled character. Loretta gives voice to the the realities of sexuality and disability as she discussed the crushes she has had on many of her male caregivers. For example, when her thoughts turn to a caregiver named Sandana, she remembers that she "ached to e held but he refused to give ground. Off would come the glasses, and to repeated quivers of the head, he would bring up the justification of his culture, when men and women, blood relatives included, did not touch. 'Then how did they manage to have babies?' I asked, a question met with gales of laughter" (p. 156). Once again, Boyd creates a deeply human portrayal of a person with a disability, one with understandable needs and a ready sense of humor. Boyd furthers this challenging characterization when he refuses to pander to audience's expectations of a uniformly sympathetic character as he later portrays Loretta coerced into falsely accusing Juan of molesting her.

Boyd's novel is not quite as episodic as this review makes it seem. Juan and Delgado are important to each other, though since good reviewers don't spoil the endings of the books they write about, I won't explain why. There is an easy rhythm to this novel, and its conclusion fits in well with what has gone on before. so while Delgado and Loretta have more important things to say than Juan or Daniela, Proper Respect for a Wound is an important and entertaining contribution to the literature of disability. Boyd's economical novel —packing quite a bit of narrative action into 218 crisply written pages— will interest anyone who is familiar with care workers and communities for the disabled. Because of its appropriation of the idiom of reality television, however, this would be an excellent tale to assign to bright high school or college students. These readers would identify with Boyd's youthful and adventurous caregivers and they flawed but compelling people with disabilities he creates because they are used to the kind of personal confidences Boyd uses to structure his novel."

Mark Decker, Ph.D.
Kaleidoscope, Winter/Spring 2008 issue