Page 45 Review by Stephen
"When you have no voice, you don't exist."
David Small is no novice: an illustrator with dozens of awards under his belt, he is an irrefutably successful artist with such immaculate ink washes over the most supple lines that it's no surprise to find Jules Feiffer amongst many singing his praises. But he had one of the most wretched childhoods imaginable, and this is that childhood laid bare, under the constant threat of a mother "coiled tight inside her shell of angry, resentful silence".
The ironies abound, not least that it is your mother and father above all others that you should be able to rely on to protect you. That his father was doctor, a healer of others, is another. But to discover that it was his father who caused Small's cancer and his mother who refused to endorse the cost of surgery to correct their neglect for three and a half years after its diagnosis as a cyst in favour of a spending spree on household appliances and parties... It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that it took a friend of the family to point out the growth on David's neck in the first place. They simply hadn't noticed because they simply didn't care.
David was born with sinuses and a digestive system that didn't work properly.
"However, Dad was a doctor. He knew what to do. Dad prescribed the medicines for my frequent bouts with this and that. Dad gave me shots. And enemas. Dad put me on his treatment table and "cracked my neck", our family nickname for the osteopathic manipulations he had learned in medical school. And it was Dad the radiologist who gave me the many X-rays that were supposed to cure my sinus problems... To me, Dad and his colleagues seemed like the heroic men featured in the ads in Life Magazine, marching bravely into the bright and shining future. They were soldiers of science, and their weapon was the X-ray. X-rays could see through clothes, skin, even metal. They were miraculous wonder rays that would cure anything."
This was before scientists discovered what X-rays could cause. There's a great deal more to this book than this review's going to cover. Small's mother and his mother's own mother in particular begin to make 'sense' as David delves deeper. Indeed there are revelations ahead which in no way excuse their behaviour but go some way to explain it. Nor is there an ounce of self-pity about this tale of stifling, household oppression - of heavy silences punctuated by the smashing of crockery and the bashing of drums - and Small's subsequent running off the rails and Alice-In-Wonderland nightmares. But imagine going into hospital, after those three and a half years waiting, for what your parents assure you is a harmless operation, then waking up to discover your young throat "slashed and laced back up like a bloody boot" with your thyroid gland and one of your vocal chords missing. You no longer have a voice. And neither of your parents will tell you why.
There's plenty more head-shaking in store for you but also, as I've said, some glorious strokes of the brush, whether it's David's young frame or his mother's friends' chic hairstyles, dresses and shoes. And then there's his mother, a remarkably vivid portrait of pent-up hostility: the look on her face when her son's cyst is first pointed out to her is the very opposite of maternal concern or terror; it's one of naked disgust.
