Mobile Library by David Whitehouse

Published by Scribner on January 20, 2015

Mobile Library begins at the end. A mobile library sits on the edge of a cliff, surrounded by police cars. Detective Jimmy Samas is worried that the woman at the wheel might drive over the cliff. He believes two missing kids are in the mobile library with the driver and a dangerous adult passenger.

To explain the scenario that confronts Samas, the story backtracks to follow the young life of Bobby Nusko, a bullied child with an abusive father who wonders where his mother went. Bobby meets a mentally challenged girl named Rosa who is also the victim of bullying. Soon thereafter he meets Rosa's mother, Val Reed, whose job is to give a mobile library its weekly cleaning. Val and Rosa become his surrogate family and the mobile library his adopted home. Until meeting Rosa and Val, Bobby's only friend was a boy who made a painful attempt to turn himself into a cyborg to protect Bobby from harm.

From time to time, the story backtracks further to give the reader some insight into Bobby's sad family history, including the truth about his mother's absence, colored by memories that are "indelibly written in love's stubborn ink." Eventually Bobby finds himself running from his past, sending him on a road trip in the mobile library with Rosa and Val.

The fourth significant character is Joe, a Scot who is living in the woods until he becomes part of the mobile library family. Joe has anger management issues. Whether he will be a good or bad traveling companion is not immediately apparent.

The conception of family as "a puzzle of people" is the novel's theme. Mobile Library suggests that the families we assemble for ourselves are sometimes better than those into which we are born.

Although Mobile Library starts at the end, it is filled with surprises, particularly after Joe joins the party. Even minor characters are easy to visualize, full of quirks and tics that bring them to life. Perhaps the purity of the characters (they tend to be purely good or purely evil) sets them apart from reality, but I don't think that's a problem in a story that uses the purity of characters to illustrate lessons about the qualities of human nature.

David Whitehouse's prose is just as surprising as the plot. There is a lot of charm in Mobile Library and more than a little truth. It is more engaging than Bed, another Whitehouse novel that explores human nature by examining damaged characters who struggle with their unconventional lives.

Val tells Bobby that "in every book there is a clue about life." The clue in Mobile Library might be that hope, the "pilot light in the soul," is the flame people use to warm their hands on days when they have nothing else. Or it might be that life is like a book -- it begins and ends but it is part of a larger story told in other books, a story that will carry on beyond the "tiny window of time" through which we peer. Or your life is yours to live as you choose, parentage notwithstanding. Or life moves forward no matter how much we want to stay rooted or return to a happier past. Or maybe the clue is that if you feel a need to escape from your life, there are worse places to spend your time than in a mobile library.

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Bed by David Whitehouse

Published by Scribner on August 2, 2011

In a strange way, Bed asks whether love is a force of salvation or destruction. It may just be a question of perspective.

At the novel's center is the massive Malcolm, "the fattest man in the world." He doesn't -- he can't -- get out of bed; he and the bed have conjoined. After spending twenty years in bed, Mal has become a media sensation. Told from the point of view of Mal's unnamed brother, Bed jumps around in time, alternating scenes of Mal and his brother in their childhood and adolescence with events that occurred after Mal stopped rising from the bed in which he now dwells.

Why won't Mal get out of bed? In his early adulthood, after Mal leaves home to live with his girlfriend Lou, he proclaims his contempt for conventional lifestyles. He fears the mundane. It's ironic, given where he ends up, that Mal poses the rhetorical question "What will there be to remember of a mediocre existence?" Mal comes to believe that (as he says on his twenty-fifth birthday) he will be "just someone who was there, and that's it." He is gripped by a malaise so powerful he cannot see the purpose of life as a participatory experience. His conclusion -- "If you can't do what you're meant to do, why do anything at all?" -- explains his decision to stay in bed after his birthday party ends, but his reason for arriving at that conclusion remains unclear.

Depression may account Mal's initial reluctance to leave his bed (eventually, his size and the intermingling of his cellular structure with the bed itself makes it impossible for him to get up). Perhaps a mental illness more serious than depression is to blame. Long before he became morbidly obese, Malcolm was an odd child. He liked to stand in the rain with his face to the sky and his mouth open to the point of drowning. He preferred nudity to clothing, even at the supermarket. It's easy to understand why classmates wrote "Mal Ede is a weirdo" on the condensation-covered classroom windows on rainy days. Mal didn't care; he refused "to involve himself in the transient social systems of school." His weirdness was only beginning.

Mal wonders if his purpose "is to give purpose to others." His brother thinks Mal has always existed to give meaning to his mother's life. Delighted with her role as Mal's servant, Mal's enabling mother feeds him enough to sate a platoon. The novel raises an intriguing question: should Mal's mother be faulted for making him happy when her actions are probably contributing to an early death? A broader question that also applies to Lou is whether love means doing everything you can to make someone happy. Taking care of her father makes Lou happy even if it means sacrificing her own chance at a relationship. Lou's father sacrificed his own happiness to benefit a woman who ultimately left him; he learned that "a life lived in a way perceived to be correct could still come to nothing." Is David Whitehouse saying that love will find a way to destroy you in the end?

Bed is written tenderly, with affection for those (like Mal's mother) who deserve it and for those (like Mal) who probably don't. The story is in some respects touching, yet I often found it more depressing than enlightening. The final chapters initially seem life-affirming (perhaps some of us, at least, can discover a purpose in life that isn't self-destructive) and while I think it tries to be, the message that finally shines through is this: if you want to be loved, you need to be an invalid. There are moments of excellence here, snatches of wistful love stories that are beautifully rendered, but the novel's portrayal of heartbreak coupled with meaningless existence makes it difficult to read. It made me, like Mal, reluctant to get out of bed.

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