A gala is a festive celebration, an abnormal interruption in life's routine. Gala is also Greek for milk, and thence the source of those astronomical splashes the galaxies, especially our own Milky Way. Milk is also linked to our infancy and hence our origins, genetic and familial. Linked so to life at its personal origin and its widest impersonal extension, milk is too valuable to treat lightly, yet we must not cry over it spilt.

Such observations are brought home to our business and bosom by [Gala]. Its narrator is the father of a 14-year-old girl nicknamed Milk…. Milk is exuberant, amusing, and lovely….

Milk is also hopelessly retarded, brain-damaged from birth, and almost completely deaf…. [In] this fictional sequel to his biographical Words for a Deaf Daughter novelist and father Paul West engages in a heroic endeavor to come to terms with the fact of Milk's flawed existence. His attempt encompasses a wide range of extravagant colors, sights, and events with which he fills up Milk's mind. It also includes his survey of a universe of abnormalities, a totality of surds in which our reasonable normality looks no less deviant than the grotesque facts of physical existence….

[We] are put continually in Milk's charming, frightening, heartrending presence; we are reminded of the continuous strain of caring for a loved and potentially explosive mind …; we are always aware, even during the story's most amusing and intriguing moments, that "part of the story of this book's story is the acid-on-the-nerves of writing it at all."

Luckily there is no way to compare pains, no way to know if Milk's predicament is worse even than her father's. We can never know how she feels; but we can all imagine how he feels, imagine what it is to be linked by love to such sorrow and affliction. And West spares us and himself nothing except self-pity. His narrator faces all the nightmares, even that of the police state in which the deformed are punished, even that ultimate pain in which the permanently maimed child is imagined as her perfected self, whole, witty, learned, and articulate. ("I know, I know, you've been waiting all your life for this conversation.")

At the visit's end the narrator is exhausted. You will be, too. But the getting there, in all its sadness, obsession, hysteria, eloquence, and even boredom, will have justified the fuss we make about the arts. This is a beautiful novel. Beauty is difficult.