Darren Groth, Boy in the Blue Hammock

What if things get worse?

Happily or unhappily, Darren Groth has done some of this terrible imagination for us, in his new novel Boy in the Blue Hammock. Set in a fictional, all-names-changed version of the US Pacific Northwest, not far from the Canadian border, the novel imagines what America might look like if the USA’s divisions became intense enough to generate something like the Khmer Rouge regime, or a new form of Nazism, such that people started killing their fellow citizens en masse. In particular, Groth conceives of a small town gradually decimated by disappearances, and eventually open murders, committed in the name of the American government. (There's a little more on politics in Note 1, below.)

As the backcover blurb says, 15-year-old Kasper is the only surviving member of his family, after the rest were slaughtered by government-loyal forces. (There’s no clear dividing line between official forces and rogues, I should say: they’re all wearing roughly the same clothing, they’ve all got access to the same weapons, and they’re all committing the same atrocities.)

The family dog, Tao, who flunked out of service-dog training, decides that he needs to lead Kasper to the place where Tao had his training. Other than the now-violated family home, that’s the only place Tao has ever considered safe.

What complicates Tao's self-assigned mission, even beyond Tao's serious injuries from the attack on the family, is that Kasper is profoundly autistic.

Kasper’s able to speak, but with some echolalia and almost entirely through quotation from The Gingerbread Man and, heartbreakingly to me, echoes of Marvin Gaye’s classic “What’s Going On.” He’s never had the independence that’d let him plan anything, so he doesn’t seem easily able to look past the present. He can’t handle touch, which means both that he can’t pat Tao, and that Tao can’t use physical persuasion to influence Kasper’s movement through their almost entirely depopulated town of Gilder.

(For more on the novel's representation of autism, see Note 2 below, and consider reading this long article.)

The novel’s structure means that there’s a one- to two-page italicized opening to each paragraph, a flashback in the voice of Kasper’s mother that gradually builds to the family’s slaughter. Mostly, though, the book’s told in the present tense, primarily from the perspective of Tao, the dog. This kind of approach always unnerves me, but an even more dog-centred approach worked for Andre Alexis in Fifteen Dogs, and it worked for me. Every moment's a crisis: Kasper is intensely vulnerable, and Tao is both badly injured and intensely watchful. The events occur within a single village, and our main characters are travelling on foot only the distance of a short drive, but it's incredibly intense.

Overall, though, I’ve struggled to get hold of my own feelings about Boy in the Blue Hammock.

It’s not for everyone, this novel. I really appreciated Tao and Kasper, including Kasper’s personal form of neurodivergence, as well as the imagination it took Groth to reshape contemporary political crises into this crushingly near-present dystopia. The violence is mostly offstage, but the evidence of violence is persistent and horrifying even if neither Tao nor Kasper finds it particularly unsettling. As a parent of an autistic child myself, I don’t need any help AT ALL in imagining the horrors that life can throw at her.

As well, it’s a survival-based novel, which means it’s heavy on plot. That's especially the case because neither of the characters whose perspectives we see through have any sense for the big picture, and I’m always looking for meaning, theories, philosophy, and so on.

As a summer read for someone who likes scary things, who has Political Thoughts, and who thinks about neurodivergence or about animal being? Give it a try, and you might be like the Goodreads readers who loved it so much. Who knows, you might even feel as positively as did my former student Erin Chan writing in BC Booklook, who I'll always trust about such things!

No question, it's a very good read, and the right reader will find lots to appreciate in Boy in the Blue Hammock.

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Note 1: Politics

Boy in the Blue Hammock is set in a near-present version of the United States, but it doesn’t name its president, there’s no talk of political parties, and even the names of government agencies differ from the current ones. The ideologies line up reasonably well, but not entirely, with extremist post-Trumpism: the idea that Trump had good ideas but didn’t go nearly far enough. However, given how deeply fictionalized it all is, I can imagine that Groth could very easily explain that he meant it to be taken fairly universally, rather than being inspired by the rumbling fractures of post-Trump America, even it that's how I experienced it.

Anyway. I’d be very, very anxious at some of the pushback Groth could get, if the novel gets read as being too narrowly related to Trump and the GOP. That’s how it struck me, but my own politics are inevitably going to inform my reading. Your mileage may vary, as they say.

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Note 2: Autism

It's tough to represent someone else's neurology. Darren Groth describes himself in his bio as “the proud father of a son with autism spectrum disorder,” and as “a passionate advocate for the representation of neurodiversity and intellectual disability in literature.” He isn't autistic himself, but clearly he's been plugged into that world for a long time, even if there's a lot of conflict about the roles that parents can play there.

I'm the father of an autistic daughter myself (of a daughter with autism, if you would prefer: I'm not sure what she would prefer), and I worry a lot about the representation of neurodiversity, so I felt some kinship there. From this overlap in perspective, absolutely I felt like I recognized Kasper.

No representation is perfect, and there are all kinds of risks in speaking for or about people whose neurologies are different from one's own, but Kasper’s outward presence felt right. In the few moments where Groth touches on Kasper’s internal world, which is an even riskier representational moment, I recognized the kinds of jumps or assumptions I make when with my daughter, or with other autistic folks in her circle. I'll always be getting it wrong sometimes, no question, but it felt like home in that sense.

(Also, if you're thinking about how to talk or write about autism, here's some essential reading on the subject, even for the non-autistic who feel like they’ve learned more than they can handle already, like parents of autistic children!)