The Beautiful Miscellaneous

Summary (from the publisher): Nathan Nelson is the average son of a genius. His father, a physicist of small renown, has prodded him toward greatness from an early age -- enrolling him in whiz kid summer camps, taking him to the icy tundra of Canada to track a solar eclipse, and teaching him college algebra. But despite Samuel Nelson's efforts, Nathan remains ordinary. Then, in the summer of 1987, everything changes. While visiting his small-town grandfather in Michigan, Nathan is involved in a terrible accident. After a brief clinical death -- which he later recalls as a lackluster affair lasting less than the length of a Top 40 pop song -- he falls into a coma. When he awakens, Nathan finds that everyday life is radically different. His perceptions of sight, sound, and memory have been irrevocably changed. The doctors and his parents fear permanent brain damage. But the truth of his condition is more unexpected and leads to a renewed chance for Nathan to find his place in the world.

Thinking that his son's altered brain is worthy of serious inquiry, Samuel arranges for Nathan to attend the Brook-Mills Institute, a Midwestern research center where savants, prodigies, and neurological misfits are studied and their specialties applied. Immersed in this strange atmosphere -- where an autistic boy can tell you what day Christmas falls on in 3026 but can't tie his shoelaces, where a medical intuitive can diagnose cancer during a long-distance phone call with a patient -- Nathan begins to unravel the mysteries of his new mind. He also tries to make peace with the crushing weight of his father's expectations.

The Beautiful Miscellaneous is an extraordinary follow-up to Dominic Smith's critically acclaimed debut, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. This dazzling new novel explores the fault lines that can cause a family to drift apart and the unexpected events that can pull them back together.

 

Review: "Being less than brilliant with a genius parent is like being the bum who stares, midwinter, through the restaurant window at the plump diners inside. There was my father, on the other side of that window, eating food so delicate and sumptuous it made my teeth ache. The seat opposite him was empty and expectant, but I never made it past the glass" (13).

 

At heart, this novel tells the age-old story of discord between father and son and unfulfilled expectations. Nathan Nelson's father is a physicist and a genius and expects greatness from his son. Yet Nathan knows himself to be of only average intelligence and resents the pressure placed on him by his father. Nathan's father gradually accepts his son's ordinariness, until an accident gives Nathan extraordinary memory and synesthesia. Once again, his father renews his efforts to make his son something special and orders him to "Stop squandering what you have! Do you hear me? Take your place!" (170).

 

I was intrigued by this depiction of a frustrated father-son relationship. I sympathized with Nathan, who knows early on that he will only disappoint his father's dreams, and yearns to be accepted as he is. Yet I also felt for Nathan's father, who clearly can't relate socially to the world the way his son can, and merely wants his son to be as special in the eyes of the world as he is to him. Meanwhile, Nathan's mother seems content to expect very little from her son, and accepts his averageness early on:"She knew it wasn't a cathedral we were building; it was a chapel at best, maybe a shanty made of driftwood" (50).

 

The second half of the novel was, frankly, bewildering. The plot takes a nosedive and flounders. Nathan's future goes off the rails, his old elementary school fellow nerds become hippy commune members, his mother lives with his father's best friend. The second half of the book was implausible at best. I like that Nathan seizes his own vision of his future, but I don't think the plot had to dissolve and all his early plans had to crash and burn for him to make his own choices for his life.

 

This is the story of Nathan navigating his way through a less than perfect childhood. "I'd been raised in a household where my father ignored me unless he was holding up an intellectual hoop for me to jump through, and where my mother's dream of family solidarity was all of us sitting in the kitchen eating pad thai while playing gin rummy" (117). Yet its also about accepting unrealized potential, and living with an ordinary life, a life that is not great or extraordinary, but quiet and simple.

 

Stars: 3