The Last Language
A Novel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From Jennifer duBois, “one of a handful of living American novelists who can comprehend both the long arc of history and the minute details that animate it” (Karan Mahajan) and “a writer of thrilling psychological precision” (Justin Torres), comes a spellbinding new novel.
A few months after the death of her husband, Angela is ejected from her doctoral program in linguistics at Harvard University. Spinning and raw, and with few other options, the young widow and her four-year-old daughter move into her mother’s house in Medford, Massachusetts.
Trained with an understanding of spoken language as the essential foundation of thought, Angela finds underpaid work at the Center, a fledgling organization that is developing an experimental therapy aimed at helping nonverbal patients with motor impairments. Through the Center, Angela begins to work closely with Sam, a twenty-seven-year-old patient who has been confined to his bedroom for the majority of his life. Following some faltering steps, Sam takes to the technology, proving to be not just literate but literary, and charming. Angela is initially stunned, then drawn intensely to Sam, and they develop an intimate relationship.
When their secret is discovered, Sam’s family intervenes and brings charges. As Angela tells her story in the form of an unrepentant plea addressed from prison to her beloved, we are plunged into a Nabokovian hall of mirrors in which it is hard to know whom or what to believe. Is this a haunting story of doomed love, a manipulative account of pitiful self-delusion, or, as the state has charged, a criminal assault of a victim who doesn’t have the agency or intelligence required of a willing participant in a love affair?
Provocative and profound in its exploration of what makes us human, this is an extraordinary novel from one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the wild and witty latest from duBois (The Spectators), a speech therapist recounts her sexual relationship with a disabled client. Like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, duBois's narrator is unrepentant. Angela, 27, strives to gain the reader's sympathy by beginning with the story of her husband's unexpected death. She's pregnant at the time, and after having a miscarriage, she's asked to take a leave from her PhD program at Harvard. In need of a job, Angela begins working at an experimental therapy center aimed at helping nonspeaking clients communicate using a typewriter-like device (or, as Angela describes it, "an overgrown graphing calculator"). She is sent to work with Sam, who at 28 has not spoken since he was a toddler. Resting her hands on his, Angela quickly gets Sam typing, and he expresses himself with intelligence, going so far as to craft an essay on Chekhov. A secret romance develops between Angela and Sam, but questions arise regarding the true author of Sam's writing. DuBois walks the high wire with Angela's audacious and unreliable narration, leaving room for readers to wonder how much of Angela's telling is true and to what degree she's manipulated Sam. This clever novel lingers long after the final page.
