The Night Listener: Armistead Maupin

                                                        

                The Night Listener was an easy read, in that I read it in less than a day. It was not an easy read in that there were a couple of parts that I had a very hard time with, content-wise. Being the prude that I am, I don’t find the goings on behind closed doors necessary or even beneficial to the plot or telling of a story, unless something happens during the intimate moment that is necessary for the story. The unnecessary bits, or the parts that I found unnecessary, seemed as if the author was pushing the point in a matter that was simply for shock value, to make sure that the reader knows that the author is gay and this is what some gay people do. I get it. It’s just private, and unnecessary to the story. Unnecessary to the point of drawing the reader away from the very weird and compelling mystery of the boy who is or is not there, the "Schrodinger’s Boy" (see Schrodinger’s Cat  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat ).

                The mystery in this fictional story is based on something very real and relatively recent, a head scratcher that demonstrates the chaos and confusion of what we consider “real”. Usually, the existence of a person is pretty apparent; a person either is a person or not a person.  What happens when people establish a caring relationship with a person that may not be who they think they are, and the existence of that person cannot be established as truth or fiction? It seems very important for the mystery to be solved.  Life is much more complicated than fiction; life doesn’t usually have a plot progression and a neat and tidy ending. Sometimes, life doesn’t provide an ending at all. For a work of fiction based on real events, The Night Listener is bubbling with different events of the author’s life. From personal relationships with parents and siblings and lovers, to a delicate “adoption” of a strange sick boy, this book is a stew of what it takes to be human in a very real and confusing social structure that captures nuances of aspects of life that I have never had experience of, and that make me grateful for the simplicity of mountain life. For bonus reading material, keep reading after the end of the story for the explanation of the mystery of the Schrodinger’s Boy.  See what you can make of it.