Boy Crazy

By Walter Kirn

Fictional stories of mental illness tend to fall into certain sentimental grooves. Insanity is a higher form of sanity--that's the main one. Blessed are the touched. They take in more light and more darkness both, seeing and feeling through wide-open apertures. Or, when they're all shut down, it's the outside world that's to blame--for being so ugly. In books such as Birdy, Flowers for Algernon, and One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest, "normal" folks are shamed for smugness, while the off-kilter hero has integrity. The reader takes a powerful dual pleasure: He sprinkles himself in the high-minded pity he's showering on the misfit, and he gets to condemn society, to boot.

H, Elizabeth Shepard's first novel, knows the cliché’s of mental-illness fiction and use2s, adapts, and resists them with intelligence. The book itself is an oddball little object, compulsive, private, logical, compact. There aren't many pages, and a lot don't have much writing on them. What they purport to reproduce is a flurry of letters, notes, and documents relating to the case of Benjamin Sherman, a strange little fellow, perhaps autistic, whose closest friend is a stuffed letter H from the planet Elliottown.

The occasion for the letters and notes is Benjamin's first trip to Camp Onianta, a New Hampshire summer camp. It's a great story-starting collision--geeky, introverted teen is thrust into hokey great outdoors--and it brings out a tense, euphemistic falseness in everyone concerned. The suburban-Connecticut father is chilly: "We hope that Benjamin will learn new skills n athletics, particularly softball and swimming." The Manhattan psychiatrist is factual: "Benjamin is a contemplative twelve-year-old. His silence makes him appear wise, but his actions reveal a gap between his actual and developmental ages." The camp directors are goofily optimistic: "We have purchased some new tools for the shop and a pottery wheel for ceramics. The staff seems like a terrific bunch--energetic and multitalented with a lot of interest in music." All this sense and good cheer spells doom, of course. The canned maturity masks panic.

Shepard gets everything right about her caring liberal white folks. She starts with the look of the letters themselves, from the sans-serif font in the doctor's letterhead to the FROM THE DESK OF PEGGY SHERMAN stationery to the faux-naif sunny-day logo of Onianta. Benjamin is kept offstage while his cast of caretakers circles timidly, venting emotion in polite, measured puffs. They seem incapable of saying things straight, of fessing up to anger or alarm. Sparing one's own and other people's feelings begins to seem like a disease they share: the American niceness psychosis. This is a mental-illness fiction cliché--society's the crazy one-- but Shepard plays it beautifully, A careful gender-neutral question in Camp Onianta's questionnaire--"How does your child behave when s/he is afraid?" suddenly sounds as peculiar as it is.

You can't just read the letters in H: you have to inspect them. They're crafty artifacts. Shepard is a reverse archaeologist, designing contemporary lost worlds for readers to excavate. Everything matters: the dates of the letters, their order of presentation, the inconsistencies among their messages. When Benjamin reaches camp, his mother sends a string of encouraging notes, each time alerting her son to expect a letter from his father. The promised letter never comes, a fact that Shepard draws no attention to, thus underplaying a big fat clue to Benjamin's illness: paternal neglect. Another touch so subtle you might miss it involves the mother's sign-offs. As reports of Benjamin's withdrawn behavior filter back to her, she replaces the farewell "I love you!" in her letters with "Hugs and Kisses!" This dwindles to "XXXOOO," then to a telegraphic "XO XO." Her hostility comes through.

As the offspring of these New England emotional minimalists, Benjamin has predictable problems. The kid who the other campers call Spacefuck just can't relate--except to his stuffed toy. The most brutal assessments of Benjamin come from Dave, a party-hardy college-age counselor who's corresponding with a slacker friend. "I swear, this kid is doomed to be the class misfit for life--it's amazing how you can tell that kind of shit. he did a really awesome imitation of me and the things I say, and phrases I use like rocking and rad and lame and you know all the words I use a lot." Dave is cruel but honest, his view unclouded by mental-health professionalism. Shepard suggests he has a heart of gold under his mouth of filth.

Part two of H gives us Benjamin raw, unfiltered. His parents show up at camp one day and take away his stuffed toy, named Elliot, which the camp directors and Benjamin’s psychiatrist have deemed disruptive. Benjamin starts writing letters to Elliot, and Elliot writes back. The inner life that's revealed is cracked, cartoonish--a jerry-built pop cosmology constructed of old Eddie Murphy jokes and Star Trek episodes.

The letters are written in a sort of code, the cyber-language of nerdy heavy masturbators. Mom and Dad are "parental creatures," and lunch is a "mid day nutrition supplement." For Benjamin, daily life is barren and foreign, the camp a nightmare of hollow jollity. But his dreamworld is increasingly threatened. "On the day of omicron 2 as the radioactive waves makes their first showing on the horizon Dear Elliot, I have heard there are some problems in Elliottown..."

The problem, naturally, is sex. Benjamin has met a girl, and his longing for what his shrink might call "connectedness" is the Kryptonite that could destroy his fantasy planet. Elliot grown increasingly jealous of host-psyche Benjamin's outside attachment and starts sending SOSs from the depths. Here, the drama bogs down a bit in predictable psychological algebra. As Benjamin reaches out to others, his imaginary friendships wither. By part three, he's entered a mental hospital and is undergoing drug treatment. Benjamin can feel the dreams departing: "Elliottown caught that speed of light ray and soared off past my earth lifetime without me. It means you will be a body without a soul anymore right? Not that you mean to be mean but that you’re gone. Please don't catch the speed of light ray and go away from me."

The cuteness quotient is high in such passages, but what makes them work is Shepard's stringency. She sets up a difficult form and sticks to it. Each strand in her web of interactions in precisely traced. By being severe with herself artistically, Shepard makes room for feeling, and we don’t resent old sentiments cropping up. For example, it's a convention in such books that when the "cure" comes--when fantasies are shattered by the brute hands of medicine and science--we're supposed to feel wistful, as in a children's book. Madness is a magic kingdom gone poof. In H, we're allowed to indulge in that cozy notion, but only to a point. Past that, madness is saddening isolation, and Shepard shows that too.

From New York Magazine, April 3 1995