Words for a Deaf Daughter and Gala: A Fictional Sequel

Mr. West is a writer for whom words are a projectile (if you remember Alley Jaggers) - freewheeling, hectic, rumbustious, percussive and imaginatively prolix. Mandy, his daughter, here glimpsed in a few of her early years, is deaf - also "exceptional" which might mean autistic - and also a hooligan who might be eating nail varnish or drinking from a potty or staring unblinking at 150 watt bulbs or running, everywhere, "heedless of gesticulating and half-felled adults and the sanity of drivers." She has only three words to begin with, baba, more and ish-ish, and Mr. West's "space probe" in the form of an epistle shows her here and there - taking care of a bird, or immersed in a bath, or developing a lexicon of sounds and meanings which will salvage her from the "long emergency" of those who live without words and with a special dependence which is also a special innocence. Some of the earlier parts appeared in the New American Review; a closing chapter relates more directly to those who deal with any disadvantaged child and his naked affection for this helterskelter, demonic creature is everywhere apparent. The book of course is for Mandy who is "as incoherent as daily light, as vulnerable as uranium 235, and (has) an atom where an atom shouldn't be" - it's for others too. (Kirkus Reviews)