An unlikely family, an unspeakable bond
The Ha-Ha: A Novel, By Dave King., Little, Brown and Company, pp.340. $23.95
For a man who can't utter a sound, Howard Kapostash has lots to say. And for a first-time novelist to choose a protagonist who can't talk, Dave King has been especially inventive. Howard is a Vietnam vet who'd been on the battlefront just 16 days when his buddy stepped on a land mine. Howard's injury was to the left temporal lobe, which leaves him with the inability to recall the names of objects as well as the inability to physically manufacture words with his lips and tongue. That doesn't mean, as his calling card states, that he is in any way retarded, although much of the world looks at him as if that is the case.
Indeed, he is thinking all the time, and the reader gets the benefit of seeing what Howard would say if he could. The dialog is all in his head as he goes about his new life, living in his parents' old Victorian with a set of renters who help pay the bills and working as a groundskeeper/janitor at the local convent. A ''ha-ha," as explained at the beginning of the story, is a small trick of landscape that conceals a boundary wall in a ditch so that it does not intrude upon an uninterrupted view of a vast lawn. Sometimes Howard takes the John Deere mower up the berm hiding the steel reinforcement retaining wall at the convent to feel the same shiver of sensation he had when the mine exploded, and sometimes he takes it up when he thinks of committing suicide.
But a new reason for living comes to Howard when his old high school sweetheart, Sylvia, now a single mom with a drug problem, asks if he'll take her 9-year-old son Ryan while she goes to rehab. At first a bother to Howard's simple single-guy routine -- he has to cook bacon and eggs instead of grabbing Twinkies and a Pepsi before going off to the convent each morning -- Ryan works his way into Howard's heart, and together with Howard's three single and rather colorful, implausible, and imperfect housemates, they begin to constitute an unlikely though very contented family. They picnic together, take Ryan to boxing matches and movies, coach him on a youth baseball team, go to his school functions, and basically take on all the roles Sylvia was performing by herself. Howard's inability to speak presents some interesting situations. When Ryan, angry at Howard, gives him the silent treatment, Howard notes, ''I'm not speaking to him either, whether he realizes it or not."
Briefly one evening, no one can find Ryan. Howard, terribly upset, goes out to search the neighborhood for him. He writes, ''A river of contiguous backyards courses darkly between the lit-up houses, eddying in deep shadows around shrubs and swing sets, but hitching my robe around me, I wade right in." For a man who is always silent, Howard's eloquence is impressive. Or rather, King's is.
King describes Howard's continuing hope that he and Sylvia will end up together: ''One torch is more than enough to carry." And he has thought a good deal about Howard's situation as a Vietnam veteran: ''This is how to become one of those frightening vets: demanding, insufferable, unmoored and unloved."
It isn't until Sylvia returns from rehab, with a hint that she wants her son back but is not about to reconcile the old love affair with Howard, that he realizes how much life with Ryan has changed him. In fact, he writes, ''I don't know what I'll do. I don't remember how I lived before." There's a sweet, sad ending to this hardened vet's special time with the child he and Sylvia never had, and King has a lot of insight into the unspoken feelings of a seemingly silent loser.
