The Last Language: A Novel
Dec 2024 · Milkweed+ORM
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229
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About this ebook
"In her brilliant novel . . . Jennifer duBois deftly examines the very foundation of consciousness while rendering an exquisitely multilayered love story." —James Han Mattson, author of Reprieve
A few months after the death of her husband, Angela is ejected from her doctoral program in linguistics at Harvard University. Spinning and raw, and with few other options, the young widow and her four-year-old daughter move into her mother's house in Medford, Massachusetts.
Trained with an understanding of spoken language as the essential foundation of thought, Angela finds underpaid work at the Center, a fledgling organization that is developing an experimental therapy aimed at helping nonverbal patients with motor impairments. Through the Center, Angela begins to work closely with Sam, a twenty-seven-year-old patient who has been confined to his bedroom for the majority of his life. Following some faltering steps, Sam takes to the technology, proving to be not just literate but literary, and charming. Angela is initially stunned, then drawn intensely to Sam, and they develop an intimate relationship.
When their secret is discovered, Sam's family intervenes and brings charges. As Angela tells her story in the form of an unrepentant plea addressed from prison to her beloved, we are plunged into a Nabokovian hall of mirrors in which it is hard to know whom or what to believe. Is this a haunting story of doomed love, a manipulative account of pitiful self-delusion, or, as the state has charged, a criminal assault of a victim who doesn't have the agency or intelligence required of a willing participant in a love affair?
Provocative and profound in its exploration of what makes us human, this is an extraordinary novel from one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers.
A few months after the death of her husband, Angela is ejected from her doctoral program in linguistics at Harvard University. Spinning and raw, and with few other options, the young widow and her four-year-old daughter move into her mother's house in Medford, Massachusetts.
Trained with an understanding of spoken language as the essential foundation of thought, Angela finds underpaid work at the Center, a fledgling organization that is developing an experimental therapy aimed at helping nonverbal patients with motor impairments. Through the Center, Angela begins to work closely with Sam, a twenty-seven-year-old patient who has been confined to his bedroom for the majority of his life. Following some faltering steps, Sam takes to the technology, proving to be not just literate but literary, and charming. Angela is initially stunned, then drawn intensely to Sam, and they develop an intimate relationship.
When their secret is discovered, Sam's family intervenes and brings charges. As Angela tells her story in the form of an unrepentant plea addressed from prison to her beloved, we are plunged into a Nabokovian hall of mirrors in which it is hard to know whom or what to believe. Is this a haunting story of doomed love, a manipulative account of pitiful self-delusion, or, as the state has charged, a criminal assault of a victim who doesn't have the agency or intelligence required of a willing participant in a love affair?
Provocative and profound in its exploration of what makes us human, this is an extraordinary novel from one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers.
About the author
Jennifer duBois is the author of The Last Language. Her first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and winner of the California Book Award for First Work of Fiction. Soon after its publication, duBois received a Whiting Award and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and the winner of the Housatonic Book Award. And her third novel, The Spectators, was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Stanford University Stegner Fellowship, duBois teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University. She lives in Austin.
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