Oliver Loving: A Novel

Description

"A dazzling novel about love, loss, and the mysteries of the mind."
― David Ebershoff, Bestselling author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife

"A breathtaking tale of tragedy and redemption... A triumph" ― People

A family in crisis, a town torn apart, and the boy who holds the secret has been cocooned in a coma for ten years.

One warm, West Texas November night, a shy boy named Oliver Loving joins his classmates at Bliss County Day School’s annual dance, hoping for a glimpse of the object of his unrequited affections, an enigmatic Junior named Rebekkah Sterling. But as the music plays, a troubled young man sneaks in through the school’s back door. The dire choices this man makes that evening ―and the unspoken story he carries― will tear the town of Bliss, Texas apart.

Nearly ten years later, Oliver Loving still lies wordless and paralyzed at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, the fate of his mind unclear. Orbiting the stillpoint of Oliver’s hospital bed is a family transformed: Oliver’s mother, Eve, who keeps desperate vigil; Oliver’s brother, Charlie, who has fled for New York City only to discover he cannot escape the gravity of his shattered family; Oliver’s father, Jed, who tries to erase his memories with bourbon. And then there is Rebekkah Sterling, Oliver’s teenage love, who left Texas long ago and still refuses to speak about her own part in that tragic night. When a new medical test promises a key to unlock Oliver’s trapped mind, the town’s unanswered questions resurface with new urgency, as Oliver’s doctors and his family fight for a way for Oliver to finally communicate― and so also to tell the truth of what really happened that fateful night.

A moving meditation on the transformative power of grief and love, a slyly affectionate look at the idiosyncrasies of family, and an emotionally-charged page-turner, Stefan Merill Block s Oliver Loving is an extraordinarily original novel that ventures into the unknowable and returns with the most fundamental truths.

An Amazon Best Book of January 2018: They say great fiction has the power to increase one’s empathy, and Stefan Merrill Block’s Oliver Loving does just that. In it, a school shooting compels the denizens of a small Texas town to confront painful (and sometimes ugly) truths, as they try to solve the mystery of why the shooter did what he did. Trouble is, many of the answers are locked inside the mind of one of the victims, Oliver Loving--who is in a coma--and his unrequited love, Rebekkah Sterling, who would just as soon forget. Block does a deft job of capturing the reverberating effects of grief, and the many ways in which it is expressed. You may not always agree with how Loving’s mother, father, and brother deal with the horrible hand their family is dealt, but you understand their actions just the same (and maybe even relate to them). Oliver Loving is a compassionate account of something we see far too often on the news, but never get the full story. And though you’ll need to suspend your disbelief for certain aspects of this narrative, I think it’s much harder to wrap one’s brain around the sorts of real-life tragedies that inspired it. By giving a glimpse inside the mind of both perpetrator and victim, by putting us in their shoes, maybe we can better tease out why such terrible things happen, and take meaningful steps to stop them. --Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review