Clik here to view.
Former academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn’t left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away, in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career—if he can untangle himself from his family drama. The link between this unlikely pair is Kel’s mother, Charlene, a former student of Arthur’s. After nearly two decades of silence, it is Charlene’s unexpected phone call to Arthur—a plea for help—that jostles them into action. Through Arthur and Kel’s own quirky and lovable voices, Heft tells the winning story of two improbable heroes whose sudden connection transforms both their lives. Like Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House, Heft is a novel about love and family found in the most unexpected places.
The story is kind of a sad one. Not get-the-box-of-tissues sad, but a kind of wistfully-yet-indirectly-tugging-at-your-heartsrings sad.
Arthur and Charlene met 20-some odd years ago and remained connected for a while via letters. As the years pass, however, life changes them, and they hide those changes from each other. It’s understandable, right? We all want to present our best selves to other people, especially if we haven’t seen them in some time — and especially if they left an impression on us to begin with. But by hiding from each other, we see that they may have missed out on the one person who could have saved them both from . . . well, themselves.
Okay, I’m being a little cryptic here. Basically, they have this connection when they first meet. When Arthur stops teaching and Charlene stops being his student, however, the connection is interrupted. Although communication continues for a while, they’re no longer the same with each other, and they can’t really be themselves with anyone else. Does that make sense? No? Argh. Just. They’re lonely, alright? They NEEDED each other. And they didn’t get each other. And then both of their lives went to shit.
Eventually, we find out that Charlene has a son, Kel. For a large chunk of the book, the lives of Arthur and Charlene’s son, Kel, run parallel, hardly intersecting. They’ve both been changed by Charlene in dramatically different ways. Charlene reaches out to Arthur for the first time in years and basically waves a red flag in the air/shoots a flare into the sky/reflects sunlight off of a mirror to get attention. Arthur doesn’t know exactly what’s behind it, but he knows that reaching out to Kel is a chance to lock it up and do something for himself as well. Plus, he’s always loved Charlene, so there’s that.
Oh! And I haven’t mentioned Yolanda yet. She’s this young feisty thing with her own problems (knocked up by a crazy-sounding boyfriend and kicked out by over-emotional parents, yikes) who literally breezes into Arthur’s life and shakes some sense into the man. What a breath of fresh air she is to the story, in which so many people are self-absorbed and isolated.
Sometimes the characters stay with you from a book, and sometimes it’s a particular setting. Sometimes it’s a moral or even some sort of desire. After finishing this, I was left with a prevailing kind of sadness. Loneliness is a prevailing theme of the story, and almost all of the characters are surrounded by it. It’s heartbreaking, especially in the case of Kel, who’s just a kid. But there’s hope! Hope in that you can stumble upon what you need in the most unexpected of places and find allies in those least likely to back you up.
