The One-in-a-Million Boy

"He had not loved his son enough. This knowledge lived like a malignancy on his heart. He wanted to believe that the boy, in a future now lost and impossible, would have forgiven him, would have taken their blundering history and found its logic and shaped it into items on a list. And that this – eating cake with Miss Ona Vitkus – would be one of those items"

The One-In-A-Million Boy is the fourth novel by American author, Monica Wood. When Quinn Porter turns up at the home of Miss Ona Vitkus on Sibley Avenue in Portland, Maine, he does so to fulfil a duty his eleven-year-old son had taken on. As part of Scout Troupe 23, the boy (whose name is never mentioned) had been doing yard work, filling the bird feeders, whatever needed to be done for the old lady. But now could not.

Quinn plans to do his duty for the required seven Saturdays and then move on. But in Ona's house, he finds traces of the son he was unable to connect with in life. "Quinn had never wanted children, had been an awkward, largely absent father; and now, in the wake of the boy's death, he was left with neither the ice-smooth paralysis of shock, not the crystalline focus of grief, but rather with a heart-swelling package of murky and miserable ironies"

Miss Ona Vitkus is old; one hundred and four years old, to be exact. "Her stockinged legs looked like rake handles jammed into small black shoes". And yet, somehow, this old lady does connect with the boy: "He waited. With the unruffled patience of a cat. This did not seem like a deficiency…She regarded him carefully; maybe it was the uniform, which could have been fifty years old; maybe it was his throwback manners; or the sea gray of his irises, which suggested an age and wisdom he could not possibly possess"

She finds she trusts him enough to consent to the recording of her memories: "He began with a question of his own, passed across the table in immaculate penmanship. His handmade questions, the product of silent forethought, invariably unhooked a shut gate, leaving her to brace against an onrush of memory. The surprise was how little she minded"

"She felt suddenly fond of her unremarkable life, that humdrum necklace of imitation pearls with the occasional glint of the real thing. The boy kept glancing at her as he would at a prize heifer, and she felt like one: round and healthy, clean and well brushed, a surefire winner".

Wood's format is original: Divided into five parts, each prefaced with a Lithuanian word, she uses a combination of straight narrative, transcripts of tape recordings and World Record Lists (which may seem a little strange, but is quite effective) to tell the far-from-ordinary life story of Miss Ona Vitkus, but also to reveal events in the life of Quinn, the boy, and his mother, Belle.

Wood's descriptive prose is exquisite: "Mrs Japan and Mrs Romania had unpronounceable names, the former free-floating with vowels, the latter fortressed by consonants" and "She's tucked the boy safely offstage, in a species of Limbo. He was less than real but more, much more, than a memory: a voice speaking from the wings, an impression of living stillness" are examples.

Wood's characters are appealing for all their quirks and flaws, especially the boy: "Belle managed something like a laugh despite her sorrow, for the boy's syntactical oddities had always pleased her. He'd read obsessively – instruction manuals, record books, novels far too old for him – picking up linguistic baubles like a crow mining a roadside".

Wood touches on grief, on ageing, on obsessive behaviour, on responsibility, on the love between a parent and a child. Her ending is bound to bring a lump to the throat of the most cynical reader. Funny and poignant, this is a brilliant read.