Lonely and crowded, loving and remote, Oliver de la Paz’s The Boy in the Labyrinth is a paradoxical book—a collection of poems heavy and complicated with metaphor trying to understand two sons on the autism spectrum, about whom he writes, “Human interaction is such a complicated thing. It is this complication which baffles my sons.” It is a book in which his reaching for his sons pulls him into the kind of language that is most likely to elude them — as if metaphor’s customary transit had been inverted, and his reaching toward his subject frequently (and poignantly) draws him away.
It is also a book in which he writes, in the same introduction that includes the sentences above:
Since 2013, I have been writing a sequence of poems loosely based around Theseus and the Minotaur myth. I do not name the wanderer of the maze. The wanderer of the maze is simply “the boy.”
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I realized that I had been writing about my sons for several years in the form of this allegory.
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This is unclear to most readers.
I am among those readers for whom it is unclear. Eight years ago, when I got to publish several of those labyrinth poems[1], it never occurred to me that they might be an allegory for autism. And reading the sequence now, in this book, I still struggle to map those correspondences in any stable way. And yet (another paradox), both de la Paz’s sons and his concern for them haunt my reading of the sequence, a presence as real and elusive as the Minotaur is to “the boy” in many of those poems, lurking in some imagined center of the maze.
The book includes four different styles or sequences of poems, all of them overlapping, but the labyrinth sequence is, as the title suggests, predominant. Of the nearly 150 pages in The Boy in the Labyrinth, 100 go to those poems — each one a short prose passage. In the best of them, de la Paz combines remarkable imaginative freedom with a sonic density that is simultaneously a source of pleasure, a show of skill, and an emblem of the compressed weight of experience in the labyrinth. My awareness of his sons comes from without, an echo from the poems in which de la Paz speaks of them explicitly, but the echo amplifies in the hard pulse and metaphorical swerving of his prose, as in this passage:
Here and there a tuft of fur snags, yanked out in patches. The Minotaur nudges along the way the sightless fishes swim up with the waters of the underworld, pulled by the current, the water sucked through their mouths and on through their gills. To the fish, it’s as if the current were a thing with a mind. It enters the mouth and leaves according to its will.
or this:
And still the heavy kick drum of the bull-man’s gait shakes the boy’s gut. Still the labyrinth gathers its boundaries in redundant corridors.
or this:
Somewhere the heat naps the beast’s hot fur, and the cauldron of what is the labyrinth boils with brightly lit intervals of twine. Somewhere the darkness. Somewhere the boy says, I am here. The beast says, You are there.
In moments like these (and there are many), de la Paz’s language makes tangible a kind of experience — vulnerable, torqued, compressed, and isolated by all of those things, but mobile within them, too, alert, imaginative, inclined toward beauty and wonder — without breaking the thread. They render an experience so enclosed that, reading it, I can imagine a body as its own maze, not unlike what de la Paz sees in his son when he writes, in a different kind of poem:
His god is not our words nor is it
the words from his lips. It is entirely body.
So when he comes to us and looks we know
there are beyond us impossible cylinders
where meaning lives.
That comes from “Autism Screening Questionnaire: Speech and Language Delay,” one of three longish and extraordinary poems in the book that take their form from similar questionnaires. de la Paz sets them up in the prologue, writing, “Meredith and I must have filled out at least a dozen questionnaires assessing this and that. We both found ourselves baffled at one point or enraged at another point. The questions felt somewhat accusatory. Like the boys were some case. Some project.” That he is also turning his sons into a project does not escape his notice. And that something is baffling or enraging or accusatory of insufficient, he seems to believe, does not necessarily mean it’s useless, or that a sufficient alternative exists. It means that the world, like any parent or child, is, as de la Paz writes of himself, “full of flaw and misconception … full of error,” and that the challenge, as in the serenity prayer, is to live with what requires acceptance and work toward what can be improved. The challenge is to live with the sorrow of insufficiency and still remain answerable to love and the impulse to better understand.
The poems are made up of yes/no questions that de la Paz answers on his own terms, as in this stretch from the same poem:
- Does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon?
To my ears it is a language. Every sound
a system: the sound for dog or boy. The moan
in his throat for water — that of a man with thirst.
The dilapidated ladder that makes a sentence
a sentence. This plosive is a verb. This liquid
a want. We make symbols of his noise.
- Does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)?
Against the backdrop of the tree he looks so small.
- Does your child pull you around when he wants something?
By the sleeve. By the shirttail. His light touch
hopscotching against my skin like sparrows.
An insistence muscled and muscled again.
If the first two answers here are hard to render as a simple “yes” or “no,” the third is not. It’s an enthusiastic “yes.” Even as de la Paz, in responding to number 6, insists on something richer than the question’s terms, he also seems to thrill with recognition and hurry to count the ways. The sentence fragments, with their quick repetitions, register as exuberance — the flood of energy we often feel inside the relief of having our experience named and confirmed.
That relief runs against the choppier currents than leap from 4 to 5. In those, de la Paz seems to be shifting perspectives, at first subtly in the answer to number 4, and then dramatically in the response to number 5, where the thread between question and answer is terribly thin. You could almost read it as de la Paz looking away from the questionnaire, seeing his son out in the yard, and completely forgetting the question, overwhelmed by what he sees. But the thin correspondence between them has its own vibration, and the stark isolation of the response, echoing his son’s apparent isolation, gains in authority because of its refusal of the terms — insisting on his son’s centrality even as the centrality reveals the perilous scale of the universe that spins out from his stance at the lonely center of his world.
It sounds, at least to my ear, like a gesture of deep, almost helpless (though carefully orchestrated) love. The fact that the helpless gesture, in its swerving, moves him further from a logic that might be meaningful to the son he’s reaching for only makes the reaching seem more real. So too does the gathering awareness that the questions, with their too-clinical descriptions, their distance from the warmth and warp of metaphor, frequently seem both insufficient and accurate.
Like almost any worthwhile book of poems, especially one this long, The Boy in the Labyrinth doesn’t always sustain its excellence. The labyrinth sequence sometimes drags, and it might have benefitted from more of a narrative structure. (Instead, those poems are organized like a crown of sonnets, with each new paragraph picking up on a term or image from the paragraph before.) And the other group of poems[2], a series of puzzles, seem (at least to my mind) to impose confusion, even as they continue de la Paz’s persistent grappling with complexity, and even as they frequently achieve the kind of beauty that runs throughout the book.
Those matter, and reading and rereading The Boy in the Labyrinth I sometimes flagged and wavered as a result. But it’s been a while since I read a book as stamped by beauty or as capable of making beauty into an embodiment of human complexity, loneliness, or love. Among the potential gifts of art is its ability to make loneliness into something we can share without having to ignore the knowledge such loneliness often carries in its bones — and inscribes in ours. It can right such knowledge. It can steady it. It can even make such knowledge hum. It can redeem us, not from but in our despair. And in those terms, The Boy in the Labyrinth does feel redemptive. Like “the sightless fish” that swim up out of de la Paz’s vision of the Minotaur, it seems alert to a governing current beyond its control and even, at times, its comprehension, and yet able to swim through it.
[Published by the University of Akron Press on July 30, 2019, 164 pages, $19.95 paperback]
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[1] I should note here that I later asked him to be At Length’s music editor, which he was for several years. Though I remain indebted to him, we’ve never met in person, and I don’t know him very well.
[2] Along with the labyrinth poems, the questionnaires, and the introduction and echoing conclusion.