No Book but the World, by Leah Hager Cohen

No Book but the World by Leah Hager Cohen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This novel about the two children of an experimental school founder in rural upstate New York takes its title from the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and refers to the belief that children should learn in a natural manner by experiencing the world rather than being taught. As adults, Ava and Fred bear the marks of their parents’ freeform upbringing, as well as the impact of their differing personalities. Fred suffers from some never-identified disability that makes him bang, bounce, drool, shy away from contact, and stumble in speech. As the story begins, Ava tries to help him after he is arrested for a possibly horrific crime in the wake of a young boy’s death in the wilderness. As Ava and three other characters narrate the story, the reader sees flashbacks to their childhood at the old school site of Batter Hollow, the push and pull between their parents Neel and June, and the childhood games Ava and her friend Kitty played with Fred – some not so harmless.

Cohen’s writing is descriptive and synesthetic, as shapes become colors and sounds become smells. The amorphous imagery is well-adapted to the children’s free upbringing and idiosyncratic personalities. Fred himself emerges as the quintessential Rousseauian wild child, unknowable, but fully immersed in bodily sensations and solitary surroundings. But is he an innocent or capable of criminal acts? Is he free or imprisoned? Ava herself isn’t sure. And Ava fears, too, that she is more like Fred than she wants to be -- always the outsider. Buoyed up by the love of her husband, Dennis (Kitty’s older brother), and the help of a geriatric public attorney in the town where Fred has been arrested, she makes headway in coming to terms with her relationship to her brother and deepening her understanding of him. “Isn’t this really what he desired, to change the state of things?” she reflects, “As a way of validating his presence, his mattering” (283). But the sudden turn at the end of the novel snatches satisfaction from the reader, especially due to the author’s sudden unmasking of her characters’ disparate voices.




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