A Stone of the Heart: A Novel

by Tom Grimes

A moving, sometimes hilarious account of a family trying to hold itself together, A Stone of the Heart chronicles the dysfunction of a Queens, New York, Irish-Catholic family. Set in 1961, the book is narrated by the family's oldest son, fourteen-year-old Michaeloverweight and obsessed with baseball statisticswho is trying to come to grips with his parents' disastrous marriage, his younger brother's retreat into silence, and his grandparents' faltering efforts to help. In baseball Michael finds the orderliness and clarity lacking in his personal world; but when Roger Maris's sixty-first home run at the end of the season both does and doesn't break Babe Ruth's record, he comes to a tenuous understanding of life's shades of gray, enabling him to begin to forgive his alcoholic father and feckless mother.

Genres: Fiction

131 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1990

Reviews

[Tim Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

In childhood, there is certainty – for better or for worse. In a loving home, there is surety of love and care. In an abusive environment, there is guarantee of hurt and fear. Children are blind beyond the horizon of family; they cannot imagine the threat of losing love or the possibility of being free of dread. Only with time does the larger world reveal itself, and as its vagaries dissolve the immutability of childhood, so fades the certainty of youth.

Michael is 14. He lives in Queens, New York. His father is an angry drunk, his mother a hopeless dreamer, his brother a trembling mute. He opens the narration of this moving story of a boy writhing within the chrysalis of adolescence with these words:

“The day my father was arrested, Roger Maris hit his sixty-first home run.”

So, it is 1961, a year on the cusp of a tumultuous American epoch, but for now still a time in which the great national debate pitches Maris against Ruth – the fresh-faced farm boy vs. the legendary, swaggering Babe, holder since 1927 of the major league baseball home run record. Ruth hit 60 in 154 games; Maris hit 61 in a longer season of 162 games, tinging, for some, his achievement.

“Detractors claimed that Ruth’s record was still the test, the standard, the constant in a world of flux,” says Michael, who finds refuge from his father in the daily box scores of the Yankees. “I had given up on the idea of constants, however. Everything was in state of flux, I believed, of longing and motion, and the best I felt we could hope for in a world in which the illusion of order is untenable is someone who is willing to assume responsibility for us, and a capacity for forgiveness beyond our largest hopes.”

Michael’s recognition of the unyielding fluidity of life enables him to move past the anger of his father and the acquiescence of this mother (who pleads with him, “Please, don’t blame us.”) It is his first step beyond the horizon of youth.

Even though Michael’s family is more dysfunctional – and hateful – than most, its debilities are universal: parents who each thought “they were getting someone else”; a father beset by the prescribed roles of masculinity; a mother dependent on her son to revive her dying dreams; a fearful child shrunken into himself; an older brother determined to break free.

The book is short – a novella, really, that can be read in a sitting – but deep, a slot canyon lined with soulful perception, gilded with good writing, and lit with just enough sunlight (some of it quite humorous) to make the darkness bearable.

In some ways it is a men’s book, at least a story about a boy becoming a man. When Maris hit is sixty-first dinger on Oct. 1, 1961 (in the fourth inning of the season’s last game), I was about Michael’s age, and his straining against the expectations of family and society – as a boy, as a student, as the oldest child – ring true for me. At that age, it seems everyone knew who I should be except myself.

Grimes is best known, and not even that widely, for his memoir Mentor, which explores his relationship with author Frank Conroy (Stop-Time). The two met at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where Conroy was the longtime director and Grimes was a participant. He wrote A Stone for the Heart before entering the workshop.

A Stone of the Heart is a book for anyone who struggled through adolescence (especially men of a certain age), for those drawn, perhaps by personal experience, to the struggles of alcoholism, and for those who marvel at the resilience of the young heart.

[Kaitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narrated by Michael, an overweight 14-year-old. A Stone of the Heart is a novella about broken family relationships. The narrator's father is an alcoholic with a tendency to disappear, his grandfather has debilitating dementia, his little brother doesn't speak, and his mother is in denial.

In the first few chapters, I found little to like. The writing is a bit stilted, and I couldn't see the story going anywhere. Everything was painfully symbolic of something, and there was a lot of summarizing. However, by the end I felt connected with the dysfunctional characters. When Michael decided to take his life into his own hands and escort his grandfather and brother on a trip, the story really came together for me.

A short read, but powerful.

[Krisi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read but not nearly enough! It was equivalent to about a week glimpse to me. .. out of an entire childhood! I left the book with unanswered questions. It felt like a short story, hardly a novel.