Love and Despair

By R.Z. Sheppard

A CHILD CALLED NOAH byJOSHGREENFELD 191 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

$5.95.

The twain met in 1960 at the Mac-Dowell Colony, a sylvan artists' preserve in Peterborough, N.H. She, Foumiko Kometani, was a painter from Japan. He, Josh Greenfeld, was a Jewish writer from Greenwich Village. As newlyweds, they began family life simply, with a cat named Brodsky. In 1964 a son, Karl Taro, was born. Two years later Foumiko gave birth to another child, a placid, ethereally beautiful boy whom they named Noah Jiro.

For two talented people, the world promised a balance between domestic life and art. But at the age of 2 1/2 Noah stopped talking. He also stopped feeding himself and using the toilet. He seemed to lose interest in the world. It was as if Noah were attending a private showing of a very exclusive daydream.

Diagnosis proved difficult, expensive and exasperating. Psychologists tended to classify Noah as retarded. Neurologists generalized about brain damage. Terms such as schizophrenia and autism seemed to cover all the ground but never really defined any of it. "The medical profession," Greenfeld writes, "was merely playing Aristotelian nomenclature and classification games at our expense." Considering that 33 of every 1,000 children born in the U.S. are or become severely retarded or disturbed, the cost in money and parental nerves must be enormous.

They went the rounds, from psychiatrists to chiropractors. Most treatments, however, were only shots in the dark. Private facilities offered little hope. State agencies came muffled in bureaucratic cotton, or their funds were frozen in vague categories for the handicapped that excluded Noah. Greenfeld's assessment of the situation: "Have a crazy kid and get to understand the gut meaning of a society."

At U.C.L.A., Noah came under the care of a team of psychologists led by a Norwegian specialist in "operant conditioning"--a therapy similar to animal training. Noah was forced to respond to simple commands. His successes were rewarded with Fritos; his failures were met sternly. Enforced hunger and low-voltage prods were part of the program.

To date, Noah has made some measurable progress. Occasionally he blurts a word or flashes a gesture, indicating a slim connection to this world. But it is likely, as he grows older and harder to handle, that he will have to be institutionalized. It is a prospect that the Greenfelds view with conflicting dread and relief. For as Greenfeld tactfully conveys in this moving collection of a year's journal entries, the family of any abnormal child is almost equally victimized. With a novelist's skill and perceptions, Greenfeld tells not only of the daily burden of Noah but of the guilts and suspicions the boy created between his parents. The book also records moments of tenderness and deep understanding. Yet caught between love and despair, Greenfeld re uses to sentimentalize his or his wife's deflected lives. He is an enduring realist, particularly when forced to define himself. "I am," he says, "a father-writer." . R.Z. Sheppard

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