Howard, the quizzical character at the heart of The Ha-Ha, can neither speak nor write. He still has a sharp mind well into middle age, but a Vietnam War injury has left him incommunicado, consigned to a simple life surrounded by people who choose to weather his expressive blank slate. For work, he tends the rolling grounds of a convent; for play, he seemingly does nothing much.
His life changes when an old friend asks him to care for her 9-year-old son while she tries to kick cocaine at a rehabilitation center. Bemused but loyal to the end, Howard takes the boy home and commences a strange sort of quasi-fatherhood. He has help from a motley crew of boarders at his house, the same one he grew up in, but otherwise the story revolves around a silent man and a quiet youngster hidden beneath a Cleveland Indians cap and a backstory that Howard doesn't begin to understand. The relationship has all the makings of a tender bond between two lost souls who need each other more than either realizes. But The Ha-Ha only partially addresses the question of how that bond is expressed.
In plain, prosaic language, Dave King establishes Howard as an intriguing character at the start. Howard is haunted by demons and flashbacks from his time at war, but the violence that silenced him proves less than integral to his later disposition, which remains distant and matter-of-fact even through spells of thrashing frustration. For his part, the young boy, Ryan, comes off as a stock 9-year-old, passive yet excited by the prospect of an adult figure who listens but can't tell him what to do. Their disquieting interaction makes for some touching moments: Howard beaming with pride at Little League games, Ryan sneaking smiles through his traumatized mug, the gang of housemates making a ritual of breakfasts more familial than they would have expected. The Ha-Ha's monochromatic presentation sometimes works against it, however: Though driven almost entirely by interior monologue, it trades less in observation than in literal descriptions of everyday people and things.
Howard's lone stretches of freedom come when he tends the convent's "ha-ha," a landscaped retaining wall built to hide a highway beneath the crests of rolling hills. Howard thrills at scaling the wall on his riding mower, braving angles that threaten to tip him over. "What I'd say to Ryan is that life exists in moments of floating—of rising high to find joy and glory—not in living earthbound," he thinks. It's stirring advice from a character forever trapped in his own head, but neither Howard nor Ryan seems equipped to let it play out around them.