The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving: A Novel
In The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (releasing June 24, 2016 as a Netflix Original Film titled The Fundamentals of Caring, starring Paul Rudd and Selena Gomez), Jonathan Evison, author of the new novel This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! and the New York Times bestseller West of Here, has crafted a novel of the heart, a story of unlikely heroes in a grand American landscape.
For Ben Benjamin, all has been lost--his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. Hoping to find a new direction, he enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving, where he will learn to take care of people with disabilities. He is instructed about professionalism, about how to keep an emotional distance between client and provider, and about the art of inserting catheters while avoiding liability. But when Ben is assigned his first client--a tyrannical nineteen-year-old boy named Trevor, who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy--he soon discovers that the endless service checklists have done nothing to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated teenager who has an ax to grind with the whole world. Over time, the relationship between Ben and Trev, which had begun with mutual misgivings, evolves into a close friendship, and the traditional boundaries between patient and caregiver begin to blur. The bond between them strengthens as they embark on a road trip to visit Trev's ailing father--a journey rerouted by a series of bizarre roadside attractions that propel them into an impulsive adventure disrupted by one birth, two arrests, a freakish dust storm, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious brown Buick Skylark. By the end of that journey, Trev has had his first taste of love, and Ben has found a new reason to love life. Bursting with energy and filled with moments of absolute beauty, this big-hearted and inspired novel ponders life's terrible surprises as well as what it takes to truly care for another human being.BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
I snapped up this book at an airport shop, taken by the title and the first page, where we meet Benjamin Benjamin (yes, that is correct), a 39-year-old who is broke financially and broken emotionally, vying for his first job as a $9.00/hour caregiver.
He tells two parallel stories throughout in the very short chapters: his current life, as caregiver to 19-year-old Trevor, who has muscular dystrophy, and the life he had loved and lost as a stay-at-home dad to two young children, married to a professional woman. Benjamin's life is rudderless except for his work with Trevor, while he is simultaneously avoiding his wife's efforts to get him to sign divorce papers. While he cannot bring back their children, lost in a tragic accident for which he blames himself, he wishes there were some way to at least rebuild his marriage to Janet, whom he loves and yearns for acutely.
This sort of sad story could easily be a downer, yet Evison tells the story with regular infusions of dry humor and quirky characters that keep the story from becoming maudlin. Even on the first page, where Benjamin describes his 28-hour caregiver training at a Howard Johnson's, he writes, " I learned how to insert caregivers and avoid liability."
As the story develops, Benjamin convinces Trevor's mother to allow the two of them to go on a road trip, and during that trip, Benjamin's caregiving abilities and nurturing come into full use, as they pick up a few other down-on-their-luck folks in small towns. I found Benjamin increasingly engaging, and was rooting for him to learn to rebuild his life, despite his tragedies.
No caregiving manual can manage to teach someone to erect boundaries between work and personal life yet forge the kinds of bonds that become ultimately meaningful, as Benjamin does with Trevor, and to a lesser extent, the relationship repair work he is able to coax along with his unexpected riders and their families, too.
I found the book to be extremely touching, and even moreso after reading the author's afterword, in which he shares the personal tragedy in his own life that prompted him to write the story. If you are sensitive about four-letter words, there are lots of them here, and while I wish authors would not feel the need to use this language just to feel 'current,' in this case the language did not feel gratuitous.
He tells two parallel stories throughout in the very short chapters: his current life, as caregiver to 19-year-old Trevor, who has muscular dystrophy, and the life he had loved and lost as a stay-at-home dad to two young children, married to a professional woman. Benjamin's life is rudderless except for his work with Trevor, while he is simultaneously avoiding his wife's efforts to get him to sign divorce papers. While he cannot bring back their children, lost in a tragic accident for which he blames himself, he wishes there were some way to at least rebuild his marriage to Janet, whom he loves and yearns for acutely.
This sort of sad story could easily be a downer, yet Evison tells the story with regular infusions of dry humor and quirky characters that keep the story from becoming maudlin. Even on the first page, where Benjamin describes his 28-hour caregiver training at a Howard Johnson's, he writes, " I learned how to insert caregivers and avoid liability."
As the story develops, Benjamin convinces Trevor's mother to allow the two of them to go on a road trip, and during that trip, Benjamin's caregiving abilities and nurturing come into full use, as they pick up a few other down-on-their-luck folks in small towns. I found Benjamin increasingly engaging, and was rooting for him to learn to rebuild his life, despite his tragedies.
No caregiving manual can manage to teach someone to erect boundaries between work and personal life yet forge the kinds of bonds that become ultimately meaningful, as Benjamin does with Trevor, and to a lesser extent, the relationship repair work he is able to coax along with his unexpected riders and their families, too.
I found the book to be extremely touching, and even moreso after reading the author's afterword, in which he shares the personal tragedy in his own life that prompted him to write the story. If you are sensitive about four-letter words, there are lots of them here, and while I wish authors would not feel the need to use this language just to feel 'current,' in this case the language did not feel gratuitous.
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