At least once a year, I come across a novel with a premise that makes me cringe – but then discover an execution with enough compassion and emotional insight to overcome what by rights should be cheap, lurid melodrama. Last year's such novel was Emma Donoghue's “Room” (barring one incident near the end), while Rachel Simon's first novel, The Story of Beautiful Girl, get this year's award for most improbably beautiful book.
In 1968, Lynnie Goldberg manages to escape from the Pennsylvania Home for the Incurable and Feebleminded with the help of a deaf, African-American inmate known at The School only as No. 42. (His real name is Homan Wilson.) Lynnie manages to elude the authorities for three days, long enough to give birth to a baby girl. A retired schoolteacher named Martha Zimmer takes them in just long enough to hide the baby in the attic before Lynnie is taken away in a straitjacket and Homan escapes into a storm.
Over decades, the improbable family slowly finds its way back to each other. There might be one too many helpful strangers for credulity's sake, but no one could accuse Simon, who wrote the bestselling memoir, “Riding the Bus With My Sister,” of a lack of realism. Here, she lays out the hideous, hidden histories of institutions like the one where Lynnie's family dumped her, where the indignities range from vile conditions in which dozens of people are expected to share one toothbrush to rape and murder.
And if anyone ever deserved a happy ending, no matter how improbable, it's Lynnie and her staunch defender.
