A Beautiful Miscellaneous is a Beautiful Book!

A Beautiful Miscellaneous, by Dominic Smith (Atria Books $28.99)

Reviewed by Mary Wolfe, Owner of The Village Bookshop, Bayfield.

“As far as near-death experiences go, mine was a disappointment. No bright whirring tunnel or silver-blue mist, just a wave of white noise, a low-set squall coming from an unknown source. I was gone for ninety seconds and spent the next two weeks in a coma. I sometimes imagine the moment when my miniature death ended and the coma began. I picture it like emerging from a bath in absolute darkness.”

The narrator of this story is Nathan Nelson, the (slightly) above average son of a renowned quark physicist, who spends his formative years trying to live up to his father’s hopes of late-blooming genius. At the age of seventeen, after spending summers at camps for whiz kids, Nathan’s desire to impress his father is waning. He’s just an ordinary teenager with an average mind. But in the summer of 1987, a tragic accident and subsequent coma leave Nathan with an altered mind. The doctor explains Nathan’s condition of “synethesia” to his father: “It’s a condition in which the boundaries between the senses become fuzzy. We sometimes call it cross-modal association. The most common form is colored hearing, when sounds elicit specific visual effects. But Nathan has a mixture of joined sensations. For example, when he hears or sees the word bell he sees a series of undulating purple lines, but he also tastes something bitter on his tongue. Some words also give him a feeling of a certain texture, like sand or cement, let’s say. Sometimes there are smells, too. It’s the exact same sensation for the same word or sound every time.”

Nathan’s father arranges for his son to stay at a midwestern research institute, where Nathan tries to find purpose for the altered way he hears & sees the world. Among the other misfits and savants, is Teresa, who has the gift (curse) of seeing diseases in people long before a doctor detects them.

This book is very easy to pick up - after all, it has a beautiful cover - and is equally hard to put down. I have a plain old average I.Q. and yet I felt intrigued by the ideas in this book. The characters pestered me to get back to this story whenever I had to put the book down. If you liked “A Beautiful Mind, “ or “Rain Man” you may very well want to pick up this beautiful book.