THE LAST LANGUAGE

Recently, Angela’s husband died, she got kicked out of her doctoral program in linguistics at Harvard, and she had a miscarriage. And, as is apparent from the fact that she’s writing her story from jail, that’s hardly the worst of it.

With $78,000 of student loan debt, a grief-stricken 4-year-old daughter, and a resumé that reveals her to be nearly unemployable, Angela is forced to move in with her mother, a social worker, in Medford (“not the nice part”). One bit of luck: Alan, her mother’s longtime colleague and best friend, has found her a job working as a speech pathologist, helping nonspeaking patients communicate via a device she describes as “an overgrown graphing calculator.” The therapy has patient and facilitator hand in hand, spelling words on the machine. It’s controversial and unproven (“like a Ouija board,” Angela and the reader think) but she needs the work, so she takes it. Eventually, Angela is assigned to Sam, a 28-year-old who inexplicably stopped thriving at 18 months and now, nonverbal and barely mobile, lives with his mother, Sandi. Soon enough, an initially skeptical Angela makes wild progress, discovering in Sam a keen and uncannily simpatico thinker who could very well be her soul mate. During their breakthrough session he tells her, “I am excruciatingly literate.” Indeed! Author duBois expertly unspools Angela’s journey to the dock, as the unreliable narrator’s mental state comes increasingly into question, teasing a Garp-ian turn and dire consequences that contemporary notions of sexual abuse and consent require. While occasionally tiresome (because linguistics), the beyond-biting academic-satire companion plot provides many laugh-out-loud moments. Angela, cursing her “archnemesis”: “I hoped he was on NPR every day until he died.” Delicious.

A sharp, beguiling tale of madness, this is metafiction done right.