Set in a wasted West Texas township between artsy Marfa and sleepy Marathon, Stefan Merrill Block's third novel (after The Storm at the Door and The Story of Forgetting), Oliver Loving, ruminates on the consequences of a seemingly random shooting at a high school homecoming dance. Sixteen-year-old Oliver Loving (named for the 19th-century Texas cattle baron revered by his grandmother) took a bullet during the bloodshed. For 10 vegetative years he has been on life support in "Bed Four" at Crockett Assisted Living Care Facility, among the aged and Alzheimer's victims.
Broken but still hopeful, his fragile mother, Eve, visits vigilantly. She shoplifts Tolkien novels and Dylan music to try to reach him with familiar pleasures. His father, Jed, a failed artist and former high school art teacher, moved to a garage shack in Marfa to sculpt desert trash and drink George Dickel. His younger brother, Charlie, escaped Presidio County for Brooklyn, where he cruises gay bars and half-heartedly scribbles a journal about Oliver that he hopes to sell. Conscious or unconscious, Oliver is at the center of Block's narrative, but the real story is the Loving family's dissolution and buried resentments swirling among the landscape's raw emptiness. With pinpoint accuracy and rich metaphor, Block's prose equally captures the psychological nuances of loss and the desolate West Texas "headshop aroma of sun-cooked creosote." It's hard to know which is worse. Each exacts a heavy toll on the Loving family.
The medical uncertainty of Oliver's consciousness drives Eve's refusal to disconnect his life support. An optimistic speech pathologist ("a Jesus-loving lady who wore makeup in operatic proportions, her piney perfume like some chemical weapon attack, her hair teased up to the heavens") translates an experimental MRI result into new hope for Eve. Periodically, Block interrupts his third-person narrative to speculate in the second person as to what might be going on in Oliver's head. His family didn't know of his teen infatuation with a local girl who survived the shooting, and who suffered abuse from her father and pedophiliac theater teacher. They didn't realize that Oliver knew that the young shooter had also been defiled by the teacher. Only Charlie knew of Oliver's rudimentary poetry and his publishing ambitions. Medically alive, and perhaps "locked in," Oliver is unable to communicate the complexity of his life--nor choose to end it. As a voice reminds him, "the machines stubbornly circulated the business of your heart, bladder, and bowels. You had no choice. Oliver, you had no choice but to live."
The driving mystery of Oliver Loving may be the why of the shooting, but Block's story gets its powerful depth from his eloquent exploration of what he frequently refers to as the before and after of it. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.
Shelf Talker: Stefan Merrill Block marries a what-happened mystery with a what-do-we-do-now study of a family dealing with a high school shooting.