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A nonverbal poet glows at the center of Portlander Leni Zumas<\/a>\u2019s big-hearted novel<\/a> Wolf Bells. James is 8, and he is the most gorgeously rendered character I can remember reading. Everything cold is his salvation.<\/p>\n At the window he put his nose against the glass, which was beautifully cold, then drew away and saw the new consistency of the air: quick and blurred and sputtering white. The changed air was leaving itself on the tree branches.<\/p>\n The care in those words, the sensitivity! Snow\u2014dreaded, beloved; oppressive, angelic; shoveled, ogled\u2014with the agency to leave itself so wonderfully on the branches! For no fault of his own, James is often in need of salvation. Like snow, he is the most beautiful problem. \u201cThe problem was not that James was autistic,\u201d his cousin, Nola, who is 13 and is more or less his primary caregiver, thinks at one point. \u201cThe problem was that society wasn\u2019t built for him.\u201d<\/p>\n Fleeing Child Protective Services, Nola brings James to an intergenerational assisted living home run by her music teacher, Caz. \u201cYoungs\u201d live rent free if they care for the \u201colds.\u201d Twentysomethings bogged down with college debt and seniors who can\u2019t afford the outrageous cost of traditional assisted living help each other out. Caz inherited the woodsy minimansion-turned-nursing-home, which is in various states of disrepair. And she runs it according to the anarcho-politics she honed in the \u201970s, when she led a \u201chistorically significant\u201d but not enduringly successful punk band. Vara, her former bandmate who now uses a wheelchair, is the resident nurse. Harboring runaway minors was never part of the plan, even if her philosophy says it\u2019s the right thing to do. \u201cI think the kids should stay as long as they need to. Our House is about radical hospitality, right?\u201d one resident asks Caz. \u201cWell,\u201d she replies, leery, \u201csemiradical, at least.\u201d<\/p>\n Wolf Bells is an ensemble novel, but it\u2019s no doorstop saga. With poetic efficiency and beguiling shifts in tone, Zumas\u2014a Portland State University professor whose 2018 novel, Red Clocks, won the Oregon Book Award\u2014animates its many protagonists in a quick and hilarious 211 pages. Chapters, if that\u2019s the right word, bear frequently repeated labels\u2014\u201cKitchen,\u201d \u201cLibrary,\u201d \u201cDining Room,\u201d \u201cBack Porch,\u201d \u201cDownstairs Bathroom.\u201d Though the octagonal living room, the \u201cFish Bowl,\u201d is the most emblematic: an observation chamber for this social experiment.<\/p>\n Setting established, the narration assumes various characters like a liquid consciousness. We lay afraid in bed, in the head of a woman suffering from dementia. Plot the ways we\u2019ll \u201ccut a new life\u201d as Nola, the poignantly determined \u201carchitect of debris\u201d on the cusp of teenage. As Marika, a Greek Jewish Holocaust survivor, we\u2019re reminded by James of our brother, who was shot by Nazi soldiers when he was around the same age. Also as Marika, we suffer an unsolicited explanation of social media from a chirpy blogger in her early twenties named Kestrel. \u201cYou know what that is, right? Randos judging a ruthless curation of your shadow self?\u201d We try to blow it off politely\u2014 \u201cSounds very special\u201d\u2014and then resort to more aggressive conversational ammo: \u201cYou know, my sister had a mole like yours, except hers had two hairs, not three.\u201d There\u2019s also cantankerous Mr. Rudd (\u201cPrick a doodle doo, the pronouns again?\u201d), the English former footballer sometimes called Frankenstein, who\u2019s just as scared and confused as everyone else.<\/p>\n Everyone has their nuanced backstory, and a shared love-hate of the House, ambivalent about having wound up here. Some residents bond, find companionship, have sex, and others clash; everyone loves James, \u201clittle apple,\u201d \u201clittle bear.\u201d However, they\u2019ve all wandered into this vacuum with virtually no strings attached. The group is as mixed as a DMV waiting room. For the most part, nobody \u201cknows anybody here.\u201d The House is its own kind of anarchy, a snow globe, a microcosm of a trial world organized by somewhat radical principles. And with all the potential beauty comes the ugly, funny, traumatic mess of praxis. The legality of housing the kids is what drives the plot. But the deepest insights are borne from the incessant intergenerational bickering, the push-pull of misaligned politics, and the mix of security and vulnerability this not-exactly-chosen family brings.<\/p>\n One resident sums up the House\u2019s mission statement as \u201cScrew Darwin.\u201d Over and over, Zumas represents how, in American society, empathy is too often presented as antithetical to nature: survival of the fittest. The House, with its egalitarian principles of mutual aid, is an extremely fallible but worthwhile alternative. Another resident borrows an aphorism from the late anarcho-activist and anthropologist David Graeber. \u201cThe ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make,\u201d Ant, a PhD student who\u2019s living at the house while writing his thesis, quotes to Caz, \u201cand could just as easily make differently.\u201d If you\u2019re waiting for a \u201cbut,\u201d that\u2019s exactly the point. Ant admires Graeber\u2019s idea, but he wants to know what Caz plans to do when the cops show up looking for the kids.<\/p>\n