‘Harold’ by Steven Wright   (2023) – 241 pages

Harold, the seven year-old boy, is in the third grade. Mrs. Yuka is his teacher. Harold’s mind wanders, a lot.

“He was in and out of paying attention like someone who was away and occasionally came by to pick up their mail.”

Of course this does present a problem for Mrs. Yuka. How can she get Harold to pay attention? But every so often Harold comes up with a brilliant unique remark, and Mrs. Yuka is impressed. Here is how Harold describes his wandering mind, his very active imagination:

“He felt the way his mind worked was that there were thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny birds in his head and each bird represented a single thought.”

And then there is his classmate Elizabeth, the girl with the pretty eyes who sits three seats up from him.

Harold picked up a lot of his preternaturally odd way of looking at things from his grandfather Alexander who lives in Maine on a lake and whom he spent a lot of time with when Harold’s mother was put in the insane asylum for talking all the time.

Like Harold himself, the novel ‘Harold’ looks at things from an unusual slant. In other words, it is a unique one-of-a-kind treasure. The reader finds himself or herself reliving the third grade.

Sometimes sitting in Mrs. Yuka’s classroom, Harold dreams he is 238,900 miles away on the moon. Maybe he is with Tinga, a waitress on the moon. Later even Carl Sagan shows up.

“Harold sat on the moon and tried not to think. He was exhausted from thinking. He tried to not think but he couldn’t do it.”

Steven Wright is a quite famous comedian and this is his first novel (Not to be confused with the widely acclaimed novelist Stephen Wright.). Some of you have probably heard this comedian’s mind-blowing routines. ‘Harold’ is filled with the same kind of offbeat humor as Wright’s routines. Like Steven Wright, Harold looks at things from a different angle.

“At his first confession he had an argument with the priest over all the wars fought in the name of the church and that the idea of confessing his sins to him would be like apologizing to the devil over stealing a cupcake.”

One reviewer questioned whether or not ‘Harold’ even qualified as fiction since there is no plot or character development. I disagree, because I believe that the fiction tent is big enough to contain this unique work.

“Of course the amount Harold didn’t know was way more than he would ever know. That’s why he was happy most of the time.”

Grade:   A