Review of New Legal Thriller: “The Quiet Boy”

Each year we gather around the Seder table to re-enact a quest for a redeemed world while stuffing ourselves with the bread of affliction. It would be nice if our lives did not involve suffering, from matzah or other sources, but such an Edenic existence would not really be living. This same ambivalence about ease and pain is at the heart of “The Quiet Boy,” a new legal thriller novel by Ben H. Winters, a bestselling author most famous for the “Last Policeman” trilogy.

The quiet teenage boy of the title, Wesley Keener, not only does not speak, but he also does not make eye contact, eat, excrete, rest or grow. Instead, Wesley walks in a circle, managing not to run into, or interact with, anyone or anything—all the result of a surgery gone wrong. Horsing around one afternoon at school with his friends, he suffers a head injury and undergoes an operation. Other than his friend Bernie’s observation that Wesley seems to glow from within at the time of the accident, nothing seems unusual about the injury or the surgery, except for the outcome.    

A collection of unsettling characters come to regard Wesley as a vessel, one with the potential to release a better world, “below us and beneath us and all around. A good and golden world,” as described by Samir, the henchman for one group of people who have become obsessed with Wesley. They want to crack open the vessel, who is also an injured boy, the son of loving parents, a brother and a friend. The shadiness of these cultists and their intentions leads some of the other characters and the reader to question the desirability of such a breakthrough, in addition to its likelihood. What if the absence of suffering is nothing other than the absence of life that is Wesley’s new existence?

Most of the story is told from the perspective of its two main characters, Jay Shenk and his son, the Rabbi. Shenk is the lawyer representing the Keener family in its legal proceedings. The story takes place in two parts, separated by about a decade but smartly intertwined in the narrative. 

“The Quiet Boy” is a tough book to categorize; it could be stocked in either the mystery or science fiction sections.  But perhaps the category that suits it best is “a good read.”

The 2008 story focuses on the Keener family’s malpractice suit against the healthcare system that treated Wesley; the 2019 story concerns a murder trial.  In 2008, Jay is determined to find something amiss in a surgery marred by its result if not by its process. In the early stages of the case, Jay’s love for his profession and the people he encounters in his work shines through. By 2019,  the relationship between Jay and the practice of law has soured. Rich Keener, the boy’s father, has confessed to murdering an expert witness from the earlier case, and Jay is roped into defending a client who cannot pay and does not want to be defended.

Jay’s son, the Rabbi, is not a rabbi. He’s a Vietnamese Jewish vegetable chopper at a fast-casual salad place. His nickname comes from his boss in response to his request for a day off for Yom Kippur, but it fits. He has an interest in people, justice and the big questions that characterize the best rabbis, along with the melancholy and detachment that plague a good number of them. The Rabbi is also the one and only junior partner of Shenk & Partners, both as a teenager eager to assist the father he lionizes and as a struggling young adult estranged from the father who tumbles low during the malpractice case and takes his son down with him.

Through the legal proceedings, the reader meets other characters, most of whom add depth and mystery to the story. Evie, Wesley’s sister, becomes an up-and-coming indie music star. The angel wings she wears to perform on stage are a telling symbol that she has her own issues. Theresa Pileggi is the expert witness in the malpractice suit and the victim in the murder case. While preparing her for the witness stand, Jay is concerned with her likability, that club used to bludgeon professional women everywhere. Pileggi, though, remains focused on concerns more central to Wesley’s fate, and the world’s. Considering the menacing presence of Dennis, cult leader and “the night man” who haunts the Rabbi’s dark hours, it is fortunate that Pileggi is not distracted. Bernie, however, serves merely to emphasize the weirdness of his childhood friend’s stasis and to introduce the supernatural element of the glow that appeared during Wesley’s accident. Like Wesley, Bernie had a potential that was not given space to grow.

“The Quiet Boy” is a tough book to categorize; it could be stocked in either the mystery or science fiction sections. But perhaps the category that suits it best is “a good read.”

Rabbi Catharine Clark is the spiritual leader of Congregation Or Shalom in London, Ontario.  Like Jay Shenk, she was once an unhappy lawyer.