In 'Harmony,' a family's desperate struggle with autism

A child is born with wings, a shock to the mother who believed the flutters inside her were the shifting limbs of an unremarkable body. The baby is not who she dreamed, but she'll nourish her "feathered muscle" nevertheless.

Carolyn Parkhurst uses this graceful, tragic metaphor in her new novel, Harmony (Pamela Dorman Books, 275 pp., *** out of four stars), to depict the enigmatic experience of raising a child with autism: a lonely ritual where wishing for normalcy is a reflex, and embracing the gifts of a special needs child can feel futile.

Parkhurst knows this experience. She is the mother of an autistic son, the fiction in her tale harvested from reality.

In Harmony, Alexandra and Josh Hammond can no longer cope with the behavioral issues of their 13-year-old daughter, Tilly, who is on the autism spectrum. The couple abandon their home and move with their troubled teen and her younger sister to parenting guru Scott Bean's camp for families with special-needs children.

Tilly, brilliant but volatile, is prone to lewd outbursts, often deaf to the derision of her peers, and obsessive. Her sister Iris, 11, is sweet and conventional. The story unfolds through the alternating perspectives of Iris and Alexandra.

The novel ostensibly explores the lengths to which a family will go to save itself. But it's more appropriate to call it a story about the inexorable tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary. It's seen in the contrast between the sisters: Tilly is autistic, and likely a genius. Iris is neurotypical, astute but unexceptional.

Parkhurst begins with a foreboding prologue: "In another world, you make it work. In another world, you never even hear the name ‘Scott Bean,’" Alexandra writes.

The story is darkly funny and suspenseful, with a palpable sense of dread that propels readers toward anticipatory horror. Parkhurst draws the Hammond family with depth and sensitivity. She writes Tilly profoundly, as an audacious girl fascinated by a world that will not bend to her. She portrays with vexing frankness the strained relationship between Alexandra and Josh, and writes deftly of Iris, her observant but naive co-narrator.

The novel stumbles on Parkhurst's flimsy characterization of Bean, which renders him unconvincing as the charismatic but deranged sage who lures the family away from their home in Washington, D.C., and into the New Hampshire wilderness. As part of the "core group"  that runs the camp, the Hammonds witness Bean transform the retreat into a cult. But Parkhurst imagines him too vaguely for his unmasking to satisfy.

Thankfully, this doesn't diminish the author's sensational exploration of what it means to be a family with a special needs child. The finale is not neat, and as Parkhurst writes in her soaring epilogue, paradoxes are ever present: "You tell her that the world is rich and varied; you tell her that we're all different, and we're all the same. Your task here is clear, and it isn't really so different from anyone else's. Like every parent you have to teach your girl to live a contradiction, to be exceptional and ordinary, all at the same time."