This book is an elephant. Here’s the bad news: 1452 pages. And the good: nearly 700 of those pages are notes and bibliography, so 764 pages will get you through the text. Those notes are substantive, though, so if you’re a completist you either have to read the book with one finger stuck in the back, or skim through them afterwards. I didn’t have the energy to get that far.
Granted, Solomon’s subject is vast and interesting enough to merit great length. Children are very often not what their parents had in mind. Anyone who has been a parent, or perhaps anyone who’s had a parent, will have noticed this. Beginning with his own experience as a gay male child and ending with his own experience as a gay male parent, Solomon explores how families live with some of the most difficult challenges: deaf children, dwarf children, Down’s Syndrome, autistic, schizophrenic children, children with “multiple severe disorders” (those who will never walk, talk, or feed themselves), prodigies, children of rape, children who become criminals, transgender sons or daughters.
Wait -- prodigies? Some of these things are not like the others. Solomon defends his rather diffuse collection by writing that he wanted to explore the spectrum of difference. He notes that he interviewed families with many other challenging situations, such as irreligious parents of fundamentalist children, or parents of obese, blind, or limbless children, or supermodels, or bullies, but did not include their stories. The interviews and research he does publish are so engrossing that I hope he will go on to tell us what he learned about these other families -- and yet, the heterogeneity of the families he did write about is so great that the reader may lose her grasp of the many interesting arguments Solomon raises.
For example, he presents a convincing contrast between vertical identity -- what you inherit from your ancestors, usually including race, language, physical traits, cultural background, and probably religion; and the horizontal identity you share not with your parents, but with those like you -- gay identity, deaf culture, dwarf identity, and so on. However, this sharp difference does not exist for many of Solomon’s categories: the children with multiple severe disorders have no forged or shared identities; children of rape are not in a position to seek one; prodigies (Solomon restricts himself to musical prodigies) probably don’t have the time to bother.
In our age of identity politics, the question of identity can become highly acrimonious. Many deaf people view their culture as a precious commodity under threat from the outside world. They go so far as to seek out other deaf people to marry so that their children will have a good chance of being deaf. They may also suggest that hearing people should surrender their deaf children to be raised by deaf parents, so that their first language can be sign. And they see the implantation of cochlear implants that will enable deaf infants to receive some aural signals, as nothing short of genocide.
“Genocide,” or the possibility that advances in surgery, treatment, or prenatal diagnosis, will cause some differences to disappear, is a contentious topic. While some deaf or dwarf parents may use prenatal diagnosis to select for children like themselves, the more likely outcome of such a diagnosis is termination of the pregnancy. Although there is a waiting list to adopt Down’s Syndrome children, for example, it is still the case that 70% of DS children identified by amniocentesis are aborted. And although educated liberal parents (the likely readership for this book) would no longer regard having a gay child as a disaster, Solomon is probably right that if amniocentesis could detect homosexuality, a lot of parents would still chose termination.
The issues of horizontal identity and pregnancy termination only apply for a few of the situations explored in this book, and the question of whether to ameliorate a condition medically probably only concerns the deaf and the dwarfs (so far). Few parents of musical prodigies would choose to abort for that reason, although maybe they would if they really knew what awaited them. But the musical prodigy is in any case not simply the result of genetics. Without the active (and perhaps overactive) involvement of a parent, he would never receive the necessary training.
There are some other crucial differences among these categories. Parents who give birth to Downs Syndrome or multiple disorder babies know the facts at birth or soon after. They may be admired, or receive sympathy as victims of a random genetic lottery. They may mourn the child they expected, who will never be. (A cheery little screed by a Downs Syndrome mother begins, “Welcome to Holland!” You’ve always dreamed of going to Italy but you ended up in Holland instead, and after all, tulips and wooden shoes have their charms too). Schizophrenia, however, strikes in late adolescence, and parents live on to mourn the child they actually had, who has changed or disappeared forever. And the parents of criminals cannot simply blame the genetic lottery -- even if they do not blame themselves for the outcome, other people certainly will.
For all its length the book is, as I’ve said, engrossing, and I was never tempted to stop reading. The case histories are never superficial. Solomon has followed some of these families for years and some are close friends. There are the expected assertions of the joy to be found in caring for a highly disabled child, but some stories have no happy endings. His research is extensive and if you may feel there are a few too many categories, and a few too many case histories, you will also probably learn more than you really wanted to know about biochemical treatments for schizophrenia, or the history of juvenile courts, or ideas about the future of classical music, to choose just three examples.
Solomon ends the book with the story of how he himself became a parent. This ending is something of an anticlimax. I wish he had ended with his chapter on children who become criminals, because it is there that we meet the parents who really shake all of our assumptions to the ground.
Dylan Klebold was one of the Columbine murderers. Reading about such a child, we flail desperately for some clue as to what produced him. We do this to reassure ourselves that it could not happen to us. He must have been abused, or visibly deranged, or the victim of cold and sadistic parents. He must have suffered such torments that he could finally only strike out in murderous rage. Or he was possessed by the devil. Or his parents were so oblivious, indulgent, neglectful, that they overlooked what was perfectly obvious. We tell ourselves that it could not happen to us, our children, our grandchildren.
But in fact, Dylan’s parents were loving and involved. Solomon avers that of all the families he interviewed for this book, the Klebolds were among those he would most want to join. Dylan himself, in the final video he and his partner made, admitted that his parents were always good to him. He was bullied and humiliated at school, but so are many, many children who do not even go home and kick the cat, much less become mass murderers.
Like parents of schizophrenics, the Klebolds had to give up the child they thought they knew -- the cuddly baby, the gifted child, the curious, eager second-grader. And they had to deal with the fact that while the world saw him as a monster (and they didn’t blame the world), they still not only mourned him, they loved him. “I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born,” says Sue Klebold. “But it would not have been better for me.”
That could have been any one of us. Read it and shiver.
