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"In 2008, a cheerful ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jay Shenk persuades the grieving Keener family to sue a private LA hospital. Their son Wesley has been transformed by a routine surgery into a kind of golem, absent all normal functioning or personality, walking in endless empty circles around his hospital room. In 2019, Shenk - still in practice but a shell of his former self - is hired to defend Wesley Keener's father when he is charged with murder . . . the murder, as it turns out, of the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk's adopted son, a fragile teenager in 2008, is a wayward adult, though he may find his purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered witness. Two thrilling trials braid together, medical malpractice and murder, jostling us back and forth in time. The Quiet Boy is a book full of mysteries, not only about the death of a brilliant scientist, not only about the outcome of the medical malpractice suit, but about the relationship between children and their parents, between the past and the present, between truth and lies. At the center of it all is Wesley Keener, endlessly walking, staring empty-eyed, in whose quiet, hollow body may lie the fate of humankind."--Publisher.… (more)
User reviews
The victim: a teen who suffers a head injury, and after emergency surgery, has an unexpected outcome: he doesn't sleep or eat or grow or experience anything human, but simply walks in circles, endlessly. A living boy has been turned into an unthinking golem, and the colorful lawyer is on the hunt for a way to pin the blame on the hospital - though in fact nobody can explain what happened or what caused it. And then, as things grow more desperate, he takes on a murder case, his client the boy's father, with zero criminal law experience. In the meanwhile, a spooky zealot of a man who believes the strangely affected teenager holds the secret of a utopian future, haunts the lawyer's son and the peculiar expert witness who thinks she can explain what happened.
Compared to earlier novels replete with fully-developed and often bizarre world-building and high concept inventiveness, The Quiet Boy is a bit unbalanced. The case of the boy who walks in circles isn't all that compelling, and the cult=like fanatic who thinks he will usher in peace and enlightenment is spooky, but all of it seems a bit thin next to the endearing and well-developed father-son relationship and the case that dominates their lives. It's as if the novel is a combination of a realistic character-driven legal thriller and one very odd interruption in that reality that is strikingly strange but ends up being somewhat of a MacGuffin. The center of gravity is in the family relationships, not in the boy who has been reduced to a mindless circling figure. I wish there had been more made of the quiet boy himself--it seemed oddly undeveloped--but I certainly enjoyed spending time with the colorful lawyer, his son, and the people who are drawn into their hopeless case.