Richard Slota’s Stray Son is a rough edged, tough minded historical family drama.
The book presents a grand tour of midwestern America in the 1940s, showing off our manufacturing and farming heartland. We learn about the thrill of driving a vintage automobile and of the work that went into maintaining the planes that helped us win the Second World War. My parents were nostalgic about Route 66 after browsing the novel!
The novel’s action kicks off when main character Patrick Yaworsky, a middle aged man who is estranged from his extended family and dissatisfied with his job and life, discovers the young ghost of his deceased father. He and his dad take his wife and two children from Southern California to Sioux City, Iowa to attend the father’s funeral. His deceased father takes everyone on a journey in time back to when he served in the Marines. While Stray Son has plenty of endearing, helpful side characters and interesting vintage Americana, it never lapses into uncritical nostalgia. The family’s adopted black son Mike faces prejudice in 1942 that reminds us of social progress that we have made in some ways, and we see through the radio news and the father’s conversation that people in that age lived with a very real fear that Hitler was going to win the war.
On November 8, 2016, we witnessed a kind of political 9/11, a Brexit as nuclear bomb. It felt like being given a diagnosis of terminal cancer for our society, our civilization, our way of life, or witnessing the sack of Rome by Alaric.
It isn’t the first time many of us have seen the barbarians swarm over American society: we saw it during the years of George W. Bush, of Reagan, of Nixon, when it came from the right, and during the sixties when it came, for the most part, from the left. It is one reason that, from a very early age, I grew to feel a growing alarm and fear regarding a certain strain in American culture that cultivates and breeds, preens and admires, some of the worst aspects of human nature, in the name of “freedom” to the point of license, of “personal expression” to the point of mutual contempt, of “the common man” at the expense of uncommon honesty and decency—of what I eventually came to see was a hyper, paranoid, poisonous white masculinity that would gladly rip up the restraints and norms of civilization and culture if it felt its privileges, illegitimately labeled “rights,” were threatened.
The howling Yahoo (I think it is safe to call him) who will now lead our country will be such an exact emblem of the dark side of the soul of American culture that it will effectively terminate our reputation in the world for a long time to come, if it does not terminate the world itself. I am embarrassed (though also, being human, a little proud) of the fact that I predicted this outcome, in the middle of George W. Bush’s administration: that the next successful Republican president would be a populist, know-nothing authoritarian, an out-and-out “fascist.” But it is almost shameful to be right about such things.
Comics, or graphic novels, are considered the ninth out of the traditional, basic forms of art. In fact, comics can be seen as a result of the joint forces of several of the basic forms of art, for example, literature, drawing and architecture.
And, comics are certainly influenced by the world that surrounds the artist: the creator of the small world existing inside the book.
The book “Fees et tendres automates”, original title, in French, or “Fairies and Tender Automatons”, in English, by Béatrice Tillier and Téhy, is a portrait of a world dying due to a war provoked by man but, at the same time, it is a fairy tale, a platonic and electronic love story, between two robots: a tender automata boy and an ethereal robotic fairy. Both of them are a subtle sign of hope for that world. Interesting, is to notice that those two beings are the creation of a man, a scientist, and clearly behave more intelligently than most of the humans. They are Turing machines (Marcus du Sautoy, 1st April 2012), a concept of Artificial Intelligence; and although they lack the capability to feel physical pain, they experience emotional pain. This emotion-driven thought, according to António Damásio (1999), a neuroscientist, is obviously linked with intelligence.
At the end of the book, we clearly sense a strong frustration that might be the result of the deep enchantment of the magical brightness in the eyes of these two survivors, when they look to the crystalline light of the stars, in the dark night. All this, despite the menace of the end of “life” for these two creations, more human than those who fight around them. Yes, the story is a tragic conflict between violence and the automata, a creature so fragile that he has portable lips which he takes with him wherever he goes…
Furthermore, the magical and cool brightness of the synthetic skin, the red texture of the lips, the waves of the fire’s orange color, robots with celestial melancholic face expressions, a round drop of moisture and “illuminated” frustration, contrasting with the forgotten reasoning that could create a much better world, explains this possible feeling of seeing real people, not “created with sin”, as if they were a strange religious effort, but using science as its main (and unique) tool… a strange Dionysiac symbiosis.
Summing up, the book is far more than a collection of beautiful drawings, with subtle lines integrated with probably well chosen colors; it is a story, a romance, an adventure and, at the same time, an effort to make us think about our concept of life, emotions and logical intelligence, and if these two are separableor not. Something keeps us reading, maybe it is the search of a happy ending, due to the capabilities of our hero made of “silica feelings”.
Bibliography:
Damásio, A. (1999), “The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness”, Harcourt Brace, pp. 386
Marcus du Sautoy (1st April 2012), “AI robot: how machine intelligence is evolving“, The Guardian
Phyllis Grilikhes’ Autism’s Stepchild is an insightful book about the author’s friendship with a woman whose daughter, Jean, lived with a condition that we would today recognize as autism. Phyllis Grilikhes is a clinical psychologist, as well as a dancer and tapestry artist, so she speaks from a place of knowledge, but the story is not primarily psychological, but a human story of friendship, learning and perseverance.
Book describes Dora, the mother’s, determined efforts to help her daughter, which included founding an organization for families affected by autism.
Although told with compassion for all characters, the story does not avoid honesty about the difficulty of raising some autistic children. Jean had great difficulty communicating and a terrible temper, and her violent outbursts made the family home chaotic.
Dora and Jean lived through many unsuccessful treatments, the conflicting parenting advice of the 1930s and 1940s, and a miserable time when Jean was confined to a mental hospital. Eventually Dora found flower child art students to come to their home to serve as companions for Jean, which worked well because they accepted her as she was and provided creative outlets. Now, after her parents have passed away, Jean lives within a group home for other women with mental differences, in a community setting where she can have friends and activities.
Autism’s Stepchild is a story of mothers and daughters, of disability and difference, of love and strength. This story is a good starting point for discussion of how society can best care for those who require help to make it in life. And an interesting historical record of how we understood autism over the past century.
Would recommend Autism’s Stepchild for support groups and general book clubs.
