The Boys is not an easy read, but then the lives it documents weren't at all easy either. John Terpstra, a poet and a carpenter by trade, chronicles the life of a New Jersey family, his wife's family, in this uniquely personal memoir of suffering and death--and life.
His wife, Mary Ann, had three brothers, all three afflicted with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. All three lived energetically right up until their deaths in their late teens, and those deaths, astoundingly, came within six months. Life in Mary Ann's house was not at all easy.
A woman I once met lost her husband in a construction accident. She had, at the time, a score of little kids. On the day of the funeral, the house full of mourners and food, her kids, she says, were almost out of control, begging for sweets. "Oh, go ahead and have more chocolate cake," she told them after too many bouts of begging. "How often does your father die?" That line came up from her soul in a fashion that black humor does with most of us, like a salty blessing that doesn't so much disguise pain as season it.
The Boys has some wonderful black humor, but not too much, because too much would poison the telling with sentimentality, a silliness this beautiful book evenly avoids. Terpstra's own poetics grace the telling, sentence by sentence, page by page. There are no page numbers; the story is told in 213 chapters, some of them no more than a sentence long. Some really sharp reviewer could explain the eccentric story-telling, but I can't. All I know is that it works. You don't breathe easily through this memoir. Life itself is just too precious.
In a number of ways, John Terpstra was faced with an impossible task in writing this book. Here's just one. Effective story-telling requires that he show us what he wants us to feel, not just tell us. Yet, almost every last action required in the treatment of his three brothers-in-law in those last years, as well as the boys' own gutsy reactions to that treatment, are painfully ugly. What their father went through, what their mother went through, what their sister went through cannot be imagined. Neither he nor anyone else, finally, can do that job. Imagine a house where three perfectly normal teenage boys lie dying, arms and legs rendered useless, purposeless, by a genetic killer that's taking all of them at one time. It is beyond imagination. But it's not imagined. It's true.
What John Terpstra struggles to show us is that despite the immense horror and the unimaginable suffering, even in despair, even in grief, even in anger against God, life in that New Jersey bungaloe was somehow good. I'm not sure any writer can do that job convincingly.
We finally believe John Terpstra only because the intimacy he opens makes it clear and vivid that he knows. We believe him not because of the story itself but because what he creates in this story has the authenticity of truth. We believe that somehow those horrible final years of his brothers' lives were good because we believe him and in him.
Why this family? Terpstra is believer, as he testifies in another book of his, not so much by choice. Why do good people suffer so horrendously in a world filled with God's unfailing love? Terpstra asks those cosmic questions we all do and answers them no better than any of us have ever done. Some answers will only come beyond the grave.
All he wants us to know, finally, is that he knows--from the heart of the family story--that those boys' lives, taken as early as they were, filled with incomprehensible pain and suffering on all sides, were still good. He wants us to know that, unbelievably, those years were among the best of times.
On the back of his tombstone, an old friend of mine wanted--and got--this line: "It was all marvelous. I don't regret a minute of it. Even the pain and hunger were sweet to have. It was life, not death, and all moments of life are very precious."
There's more death in this book than most of us care to encounter anywhere, but what Terpstra makes very clear is there's also abundant life.
I don't know exactly how he does it, but I believe him.
The Boys is a story you'll never forget.
His wife, Mary Ann, had three brothers, all three afflicted with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. All three lived energetically right up until their deaths in their late teens, and those deaths, astoundingly, came within six months. Life in Mary Ann's house was not at all easy.
A woman I once met lost her husband in a construction accident. She had, at the time, a score of little kids. On the day of the funeral, the house full of mourners and food, her kids, she says, were almost out of control, begging for sweets. "Oh, go ahead and have more chocolate cake," she told them after too many bouts of begging. "How often does your father die?" That line came up from her soul in a fashion that black humor does with most of us, like a salty blessing that doesn't so much disguise pain as season it.
The Boys has some wonderful black humor, but not too much, because too much would poison the telling with sentimentality, a silliness this beautiful book evenly avoids. Terpstra's own poetics grace the telling, sentence by sentence, page by page. There are no page numbers; the story is told in 213 chapters, some of them no more than a sentence long. Some really sharp reviewer could explain the eccentric story-telling, but I can't. All I know is that it works. You don't breathe easily through this memoir. Life itself is just too precious.
In a number of ways, John Terpstra was faced with an impossible task in writing this book. Here's just one. Effective story-telling requires that he show us what he wants us to feel, not just tell us. Yet, almost every last action required in the treatment of his three brothers-in-law in those last years, as well as the boys' own gutsy reactions to that treatment, are painfully ugly. What their father went through, what their mother went through, what their sister went through cannot be imagined. Neither he nor anyone else, finally, can do that job. Imagine a house where three perfectly normal teenage boys lie dying, arms and legs rendered useless, purposeless, by a genetic killer that's taking all of them at one time. It is beyond imagination. But it's not imagined. It's true.
What John Terpstra struggles to show us is that despite the immense horror and the unimaginable suffering, even in despair, even in grief, even in anger against God, life in that New Jersey bungaloe was somehow good. I'm not sure any writer can do that job convincingly.
We finally believe John Terpstra only because the intimacy he opens makes it clear and vivid that he knows. We believe him not because of the story itself but because what he creates in this story has the authenticity of truth. We believe that somehow those horrible final years of his brothers' lives were good because we believe him and in him.
Why this family? Terpstra is believer, as he testifies in another book of his, not so much by choice. Why do good people suffer so horrendously in a world filled with God's unfailing love? Terpstra asks those cosmic questions we all do and answers them no better than any of us have ever done. Some answers will only come beyond the grave.
All he wants us to know, finally, is that he knows--from the heart of the family story--that those boys' lives, taken as early as they were, filled with incomprehensible pain and suffering on all sides, were still good. He wants us to know that, unbelievably, those years were among the best of times.
On the back of his tombstone, an old friend of mine wanted--and got--this line: "It was all marvelous. I don't regret a minute of it. Even the pain and hunger were sweet to have. It was life, not death, and all moments of life are very precious."
There's more death in this book than most of us care to encounter anywhere, but what Terpstra makes very clear is there's also abundant life.
I don't know exactly how he does it, but I believe him.
The Boys is a story you'll never forget.
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