A Review of Dean Kostos' ‘The Boy Who Listened to Paintings: A Memoir’
By Michael McKeown Bondhus
Early in Dean Kostos’s memoir of bullying and abuse, a childhood art teacher takes him and a couple of other kids out to the countryside to paint landscapes. In what’s clearly a formative moment, Kostos describes how his teacher complimented him on his “ability to find secret colors—a [farmhouse’s] rosy, ash-colored roof, which other students simply painted gray.” As it turns out, “finding secret colors” is a key to the book as a whole.
To describe The Boy Who Listened to Paintings (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) as a memoir about trauma would be like describing the Mona Lisa as a painting of a woman—accurate, but oversimplified. It would also be reductive to describe it as a book about art’s redemptive potential. Given the book’s exquisite craft—its images, its motifs, its repetitions—it would be better to say that The Boy Who Listened to Paintings is, in its own way, a painting. And a poem. And a memoir.
It does not take long for the reader to be plunged into the depth of Kostos’s pain. Mercilessly bullied at school and trapped in the role of peacemaker between his feuding parents, he describes an adolescent suicide attempt that was disrupted by his hearing the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” playing on the radio. Lennon’s plaintive lyrics “All the lonely people” resonate with the teenaged Kostos, as they might with any marginalized person, but Kostos takes it beyond simple identification—“With the words of the song pouring into my ears, my mind thought beyond words. The music filled me the way watercolor drenches paper.” This type of lovely synesthesia pervades the book as he realizes that “one ally would be there when everything else abandoned me. Beauty: leaves shot through with veins. Beauty: a brush dripping with color. Beauty: light streaming from a painting. Beauty: a song keening from my radio. I decided to live.”
While his suicide attempt is undoubtedly one of the most poignant moments in the memoir, less immediately visible is Kostos’s oddly beautiful description of the neckties he had used to construct the noose: “Neckties. I had a dozen: striped, paisley.” There is nothing florid about this description and it could easily be overshadowed by his subsequent epiphany about beauty, yet something about the simple image and its poetic syntax resonates. Perhaps it’s because it is so characteristic of this young man to recognize style and pattern even in such a critical moment. Though some might see this as “glorifying pain,” the writer’s ability to draw beauty out of his suffering is what saves him time and again.
Kostos eventually has himself committed to the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital (known colloquially as “the Toot”) to escape the extreme bullying he’s experiencing at boarding school. The bulk of the memoir is focused on his time in the Toot, the people he meets there, and his many encounters with “secret colors.” For example, one inmate Kostos encounters is the delightful Peggy, a patient he describes as “the clown lady” because of her orange wig and colorful bubblegum wrapper bracelets. Peggy comes across as something of an unconscious poet, describing snow falling into the Toot’s courtyard as “God’s dandruff falling jumbly from a tumble of white sky.”
In recalling events, Kostos shifts from Peggy’s observation to the following narration: “Many of us got up to admire the snow clinging to trees and houses…everything had been blanketed—immaculate, quiet. The therapist had us make snowflakes to decorate the ward with for the next holiday, Christmas.” Gently guiding us through three images—snow as dandruff, snow blanketing the earth, snowflake cutouts, Kostos reveals subtle gradations of white as if painting for the reader “a rosy, ash-colored roof, which other students simply painted gray.”
A similarly well-crafted moment occurs later in the memoir. After experiencing a traumatic event involving one of his friends in the Toot, Kostos writes
I toweled off and walked to the ward for the first time that day. Reaching the dining room, I was silent. A blurry sensation pushed through my body. Everything got on my nerves: the dissonant sound of the TV and its canned laughter, somebody arguing with a nurse, the smell of greasy food. Dad’s words played in my head like a confusing static. After picking at a dinner roll, I drifted back to my room.
Again, the subtle art of these lines reminds the reader of Kostos’s background as an extensively published, award-winning poet. Quiet rolling r’s and softly hissing s’s pervade the passage as Kostos “drifts” between ward and room, dissociated, dully registering sounds and smells through a haze of grief. The near synesthesia of a “blurry sensation push[ing]” and “words like static” invokes both mental illness and his earlier observation that “colors had sounds and vice versa,” a discovery that allows for “a new way of seeing.” And it is, as this “new way of seeing” ultimately carries him through his dark nights of the soul.
Though there are many memoirs about abuse and trauma, what sets Kostos’s apart are its painterly and poetic sensibilities. While skimming The Boy Who Listened to Paintings to write this review, I found myself noticing motifs that I hadn’t on my first read. It was as if reading the book was akin to looking at a painting close-up, while skimming allowed me to step back and see how all the lines and brushstrokes worked together to create a deceptively simple whole. Not surprisingly, Kostos packs a lot of narrative and emotional content into this slim book, but by attuning their eyes (and ears) readers will also be strongly impacted by this wonderful memoir’s many “secret colors.”
Michael McKeown (formerly Charlie) Bondhus is an Irish-American writer. He's the author of Divining Bones (Sundress, 2018) and All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Missouri Review, Columbia Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Copper Nickel. He has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers (UK). He is associate professor of English at Raritan Valley Community College (NJ). More at: http://charliebondhus.com.
