The Quiet Boy

March 15, 2021
Science fiction, the paranormal, cults, and oddball characters collide in this amiable thriller. Something very bad has happened to young Wesley Keener. He's cracked his skull open--just how is a matter requiring some fact-finding--and now he's empty of everything but a bright light, something like the trunk of the car at the center of Alex Cox's film Repo Man. "Hollow....They hollowed him out." So thinks Jay Albert Shenk, a Los Angeles ambulance-chaser attorney who sports a tiny ponytail and a generally good-natured attitude, turning competitive only when he's up against lesser lawyers. He's a fine and mostly honest fellow in whom Winters, an expert practitioner of odd scenarios in books such as Underground Airlines (2016), invests much attention and character development. In company with his adopted son, Ruben, a grocery-store clerk--born in Vietnam, raised Jewish, and nicknamed "Rabbi"--Shenk tries to ferret out what it was, exactly, that happened to poor Wesley while filing a medical malpractice against the doctors--the "they" in question--who treated him once he was rushed to the hospital. "Shenk had been doing this for nineteen years...and he could give you the lowdown on every sawbones, on every hospital and clinic and urgent care in Southern California," Winters writes. The doctors range from weary to evasive to self-appointed deity, but they're the least of Shenk's problems: Both he and Ruben are visited by spectral cultists who think Wesley's shell might just harbor a portal to another world. Wesley's dad is a handful, the expert witness Shenk hires turns out to be a slippery character, and Wesley's sister, Evie, "not a rock star, not exactly, but she was a certified indie darling, her star ascendant," has plenty of complicating secrets of her own. Winters' lively tale jumps from decade to decade and all over the map as everyone grows older except Wesley, with a growing trail of bodies and suspects to mark the story's passage. An entertaining concoction with plenty of twists on the way to a nicely unexpected resolution.

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Starred review from April 1, 2021
The year is 2008. During what was supposed to be routine surgery, a boy suffers a mysterious catastrophic event that renders him utterly unresponsive to stimulus, incapable of doing anything other than walk, constantly, around and around his hospital room. More than a decade later, attorney Jay Shenk, who represented the boy's family in their earlier lawsuit against the hospital, is asked to defend the boy's father against a charge of murder. The victim: an expert witness who testified at the 2008 trial. Alternating between the two trials, Winters, author of the brilliant Last Policeman trilogy and the more recent Golden State (2019), explores a number of themes here: murder, medical malpractice, and the mysteries of human consciousness. He also explores the relationship between Jay and his adopted son, Ruben, who grows from boy to man over the course of the story, and who plays a key role in the murder case. Winters, who got his start writing parodies (Android Karenina, 2010), has proved himself to be one of of our most fascinating genre blenders of crime and speculative fiction, a writer who never fails to challenge his readers to embrace new ideas and new forms of reality. A wonderful, thoughtful book.

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