The Ha-Ha: A Novel
by Dave King
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dave KingEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-03-06
ISBN: 0316010715
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Book Reviews of The Ha-Ha: A Novel
Book Review: Channels for communication
Summary: 5 Stars
Very very few books have touched my soul as did The Ha Ha. As I read it, I had to stop many times to contemplate Howard's existence; his world. What might if feel like to be this extraordinary yet prosaic protagonist. How do we communicate as one human being to another? What happens to our world and our relationships when we cannot speak or read or write - but can still think and feel? Author Dave King casts a brilliant light on this compelling and at times heartbreaking condition - to think but not to speak. To hear but not to be able to respond. To understand but not have the ability to read. Communication is all we have to reach out to another person; to engender love or hate; to learn and share experience. Yet in some subtle way, Howard is able to tell os of his life through the words of King. It is extraordinary and subtle.
I had to stop at various points in the book to let myself feel the events in the daily lives of the protagonist and of the very few people with whom he creates a bond. Howard's inability to communicate in the conventional sense does not leave us with a bitter or solitary man. Rather, through his daily experiences, sad, funny, frustrating, hopeful we feel Howard's reality as less than an end to his life but instead, an example of the wonderful ability we all have to go beyond our capabilities, to be "better than ourselves."
This is a very special book making the reader want to contemplate many of the daily events, banal and monumental, that make up the character of our own lives. I found the mundane events of Howard's life to be the most profound and touching. His view of the world has a puzzled clarity to it which made him "real" to me.
And I am ever so grateful that our world has those few very special writers who offer us such a gifts as this illuminating book of a life.
Summary of The Ha-Ha: A Novel
Howard Kapostash has not spoken in thirty years. The small repertory of gestures and simple sounds that he uses to communicate lead most people to assume he is disturbed. No one understands that Howard is still the same man he was before his tragic injury. But when he agrees to help an old girlfriend by opening his home to her nine-year-old son, the presence of this nervous, resourceful boy in his life transforms Howard utterly. He is afforded a rare glimpse of life outside his shell ? with all its exuberant joys and crushing sorrows.Peel back the made-for-TV-movie premise of Dave King's The Ha-Ha and you'll find a shrewd, engrossing, and occasionally gritty first novel in the tradition of Jane Smiley. Howard is a brain-damaged Vietnam vet who can't speak or write, but who has managed to establish a reasonably good life in his small Midwestern hometown. In fact, Howard's chief limitation isn't his silence but his lingering romantic attachment to his high school girlfriend, Sylvia, now the drug-addicted single mother of a nine-year-old boy named Ryan (not Howard's child). Accustomed to Howard's devotion--and equally accustomed to rejecting his love, like a campfire she pees on again and again--Sylvia more or less dumps Ryan on him when she is forced to enter rehab. Yes, the handicapped vet must forge a relationship with the sullen fatherless boy. With material as Hallmark-tinged like this, it's only through vivid, honest, and far from syrupy characterization that King keeps sentimentality at bay. You can predict what happens when the gruff Howard begins to coach Little League (aw, shucks), but not his ferocious reaction to Sylvia's eventual betrayal. A skillful debut with several surprises. --Regina Marler
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