For a book that’s only about 350 pages long, there’s quite a bit of story crammed into Rachel Simon’s The Story of Beautiful Girl. I read the author’s note at the end of the book once I’d finished it (for a change, I rarely read these), and I have to say it was really illuminating. The Story of Beautiful Girl takes its inspiration from the true story of God Knows His Name: The True Story of John Doe No. 24, about a deaf man who was incarcerated in a mental institution because no one understood his dialect of sign language. It also takes a significant part of its inspiration from the stories of mental institution inmates and the closing down of those institutions in the 1970s.
The Story of Beautiful Girl begins in 1968, when a deaf man and a girl with speech and intellectual impairments (and her daughter) arrive in a thunderstorm at a widow’s isolated farmhouse. The institution staff are hot on their heels. When the eponymous girl asks the widow to hide her daughter, the widow agrees on impulse. When she sees how the staff treat the girl and her boyfriend, the widow knows she made the right decision. At that point, the story splits into three (later four) narratives. The widow, Martha, takes the infant on the road, looking for a safe place to raise up little Julia. The deaf man, Homan, gets separated from the girl, Lynnie, and ends up nearly drowning in a river. Lynnie gets caught and taken back to the institution.
Martha has her hands full with the precocious Julia, but she keeps her safe. The more interesting plot strands for me were Homan and Lynnie’s stories. Homan is heaped with discrimination every where he goes, for being deaf and for being black. No one understands him, but he’s smart enough to turn exploitation around. He uses other people just as much as he is used. For years, he struggles to get back to Lynnie and “Little One.” Lynnie’s story is, if possible, even more heartbreaking. Because its the 1960s and early 1970s, the mentally ill and intellectually disabled were still warehoused far away from their families in facilities that were often worse than prisons. Her life starts to improve as reporters and lawmakers investigate the conditions of the institutions. It gets even better when she starts to get the right kind of help for her selective mutism.
The plots parallel each other for decades. As the end of the book approached, I started to wonder if Simon really would bring all the characters back again. I don’t mind telling you here that they do, because you can’t really call it a spoiler when the ending is hinted at on the book jacket. But Simon has to resort to some Dickens-level coincidences to get the job done. Up to that point, I had no quibbles about the book or the author’s choices. The characters are all finely drawn. The pacing is decent, if a little slow. I was hooked from the first chapter by the premise. So, apart from those phenomenally lucky breaks, I quite enjoyed this book.