Heft by Liz Moore

This recently released fiction offering by young writer Liz Moore has been getting some fairly good reviews so I picked it up at the library.

It is a book you will not soon find one like. In this book we meet two characters so far apart in their lives and backgrounds that it seems impossible that their lives will come together.

Arthur Opp is a 58 year old single man, never married, a former college professor, and, oh yes, Arthur is a hermit who lives in Brooklyn, has not left his house for ten years, and weighs well over 500 pounds. How Arthur got to this point in life is told in a backstory.

Arthur " Kel" Keller is a Sr who goes to a rich suburban school outside of Yonkers. Kel plays baseball and has hopes of becoming a professional player. Kel is popular but has to take care of his mother a woman in her late thirties who is herself a shut in, only her issue is alcohol.

Mr. Opp's story hurts to read. It should. He is a nice man, he had a famous father who abandoned he and his Mother. As one might imagine he was not popular in school and when a misunderstanding leads to a rebuke at the college he has taught at for years he just drifts away of embarrassment. Arthur is a nice man, a good man, a caring man, who has pushed himself to the outskirts of society.

Kel as a popular athlete gets away with being poor because of his looks, his athletic ability and his assured confidence. He slides through life and sees himself as a New York Met in the near future. In fact he has a private tryout pending with the Mets.

Mr. Opp had a student when he taught, a shy student that he befriended and wrote letters with for the last twenty years. Kel's Mom had gone to college for a semester long ago and met a teacher she admired and looked up to. Something terrible happens to Kel's word that changes it forever, at the same time a young housekeeper brings a light of hope into the lonely existence of Mr. Arthur Opp.

This book is an easy read. It grows on you until today I read the last 150 pages in a quick and easy finish to in the end what becomes a very strong book. A book that makes you think, a book that makes you feel what some other person might feel. Any book that lets you sit inside the mind of one of the broken and lonely people of the world might well change your actions and attitudes in the future.


For that in this book we should be glad. Moreover this is a great story. I could see this being a movie, but one wonders if Hollywood with it's fear of obesity as anything more than a joke could do it justice.

A wonderful book.