The Story of Beautiful Girl, by Rachel Simon

These days it’s a rare novel that addresses disturbing social issues without flinching and treats religious faith as a force for good, without denying the complexity of either. That combination makes Rachel Simon’s book, newly available in paperback, a pleasure to read and a fine choice for book clubs.

The story begins with a fateful encounter in 1963 between three people: Lynnie, a developmentally delayed young white woman sent as a child to live at the state’s School for the Incurable and Feeble Minded; Homan, a deaf black man taken to the school because people mistook his inability to speak for feeblemindedness; and Martha, a 70-year-old widow living on a farm near the school. Lynnie and Homan try to run away from the institution before Lynnie gives birth to a child, the result of a rape by one of the school’s staff. In a heavy rainstorm they seek refuge at Martha’s house shortly after the baby is born. When people from the school trace them, Homan escapes and Lynnie is returned to the institution, but not before she extracts a promise that Martha will hide and care for the child. It’s 33 years before Lynnie and Homan are reunited, and neither sees Martha again, but their connection is deep and unbreakable. The novel alternates between their stories.

In its squalor and cruelty, the School for the Incurable and Feeble Minded rivals Charles Dickens’s debtor’s prisons and orphanages. Reassured by the school’s hypocritical administrator, parents put away their mentally disabled children there and try to forget them. Since few parents visit or inspect the school, the children are at the mercy of a poorly supervised, overworked and untrained staff. They suffer neglect and abuse. They live closely packed into dreary, smelly cottages where they must share even a toothbrush. The “school” requires them to do menial tasks but gives them no education or training. “They don’t learn anything; they don’t understand anything. . . . They don’t feel pain,” one of the attendants says. Among themselves, the inmates call the school “Sing-Sing” or “the dump.” Homan’s name for it is “the Snare.”