YOUR HEART IS A MUSCLE THE SIZE OF A FIST, first novel set in a major, convulsive inflection point

YOUR HEART IS A MUSCLE THE SIZE OF A FIST
SUNIL YAPA
Lee Boudreaux Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Flamethrowers meets Let the Great World Spin in this debut novel set amid the heated conflict of Seattle's 1999 WTO protests.

On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor—a boyish, scrappy world traveler who's run away from home—sets out to sell marijuana to the 50,000 anti-globalization protestors gathered in the streets. It quickly becomes clear that the throng determined to shut the city down—from environmentalists to teamsters to anarchists—are testing the patience of the police, and what started as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence.

Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the lives of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn't seen in three years, two protestors struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country's fate, hinges on getting through the angry crowd, out of jail, and to his meeting with the president of the United States.

In this raw and breathtaking novel, Yapa marries a deep rage with a deep humanity, and in doing so casts an unflinching eye on the nature and limits of compassion.

A LOVELY SURPRISE GIFT. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Doing something, he had discovered, anything, however small, that contributed to your meaningfulness of self and surroundings—well, that was the trick. That was the trick to not feel like shit.
–and–
What is the function of the heart, if not to convince the blood to stay moving with the limits where it belongs, to stay at home.

Stay at home, stay at home, stay at home.

But restless thing that it is, your blood, it leaps into the world.
–and–
...{T}hey learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.

What the 1999 WTO Protests taught the reactionaries around the world was that there was nothing they could do to win the hearts of the people. They set about controlling their bodies instead. As Author Yapa put it, "...how deep the darkness of the heart which longs for control," and there it is out in the open. The hearts of a few demand that the world obey them, obey their darkness, and submit to external control.

None of the seven PoV characters in this story are without that darkness. They're all on trajectories that will not allow then to remain unbruised and unbattered by life, and more particularly by the awfulness of demanding economic justice from those whose entire way of life, whose whole sense of self, is rooted in and branches from their hoarded wealth. There are those whose one need in this life is to deny others what they want and/or need (preferably both) so they can Win, they can be seen to be Right because they've won! Then there are those whose one need in this life is to take away what it is they've decided is unfairly denied to others:

They wanted to tear down the borders, to make a leap into a kind of love that would be like living inside a new human skin, wanted to dream themselves into a life they did not yet know. He heard them in the streets saying, “Another world is possible,” and beneath his ribs broken and healed and twice broken and healed and thrice broken and healed, he shuddered and thought, God help us. We are mad with hope. Here we come.
–and–
Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privelege, wasn't it? To think blindness a preferable condition.

And neither side of this divide sees the grim and angry reality: They're one coin. Heads, tails, maybe they're aesthetically distinct but they're one zero-sum-game playing piece of a coin. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

The central spine of the book, for this reader, is the story of Bishop and Victor...father and son, estranged, and truly, absolutely the same man, the same wounded-by-loss, blinded-by-love man. Just as sad as father-and-son estrangements always are. Just as inevitable as the voice of experience being unable to be the ears of acceptance that a rudderless, shallow-drafted dinghy of a boy needs to find a channel in the rough storms he can't avoid:

“What we require of others so that we may live our lives of easy convenience. Dad, there are people who work all day every day for thirty years assembling the three wires that make a microwave timer beep. What are we supposed to think of this? How do they survive it? Why do we ask them to?”
–and–
“Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.”

Singing the same song, different verses, and different keys...the minor key of youthful wounds, the major key of adult scars.

What you need to know is that Author Yapa wrote a polyphonic poem, a written kōan to the concept of connection and belonging. What you want to read needs to be story of discovering yourself in many places, seeing your wounds and worlds across gulfs of experience and of time as you seek out the hand, the heart, the warm and welcoming shoulder to shelter and comfort you:

It was 1999 in America, he had traveled the world for three years, looking for what he didn’t know, and now here he found himself: absolutely allergic to belief, nineteen years old, and totally alone.
–and–
And yet there he was, his son, looking and smiling through his half-opened eyes, not a look of concern, but as if he understood in some way, the sometime knowledge of what this is, the knowledge of the whole ugly beautiful thing, the knowledge of the courage it takes to move into fear and to fuck up and to go on living, knowing that sometimes it is two people alone and some small kindness between them that is not even called family, or forgiveness, but might be what some, on the good days, call love.

Good days or bad, that is its name: Love. There are strands to this too-short, too-scattered narrative that seek their love, that clutch their illusions of love; but in this father, whose son is not his flesh and blood but is his, and this son, whose world refuses to stop hurting and whose heart can't make itself heard yet, there is a beautiful, complete love of like-minded men.

If that's a story you need to read, as I did, then get this into your hands at once.