Customer Reviews

Memory (Hard Case Crime)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Memory is the final novel from mystery grandmaster Donald Westlake. It is sold as a paperback original, coming from dedicated pulp specialists Hard Case Crime.

The concept of amnesia - and lost identity - is a common one through the pulps. Many of the great (and not-so-great) authors have used this method to create dramatic tension ("Is this woman a friend or an enemy?"), redefine characters ("I'm a good guy now!") and set up a shocking final reveal ("Good lord, I'M the dead man!"). Westlake's Memory transforms this literary device into an art form.

Paul Cole begins the book in the arms of another man's wife. Unfortunately, the man (armed with heavy furniture) takes exception to that. So by the second chapter, Paul is in the hospital with a bad concussion. Although Paul's breaks and bruises heal quickly, his memory does not. He quickly realizes - and then re-realizes and re-realizes - that his life has changed completely. After a brief convalescence, Paul is dumped out on the streets of a seedy Midwestern town, with only a handful of doctor's bills and a morally-outraged local cop to keep him company. Paul's initial mission is simple: get back to New York City (according to his wallet, he lives there).

As the book progresses, Paul's mission becomes less simple. Day to day actions like paying rent or getting to work present major challenges to him. He can't even remember his own taste in music, much less what he got up to with his last girlfriend(s). His initial goal of getting back to New York City proves a false hope - Paul is surrounded by an "aura of hopelessness" (to quote one of his old friends). Just changing location doesn't shrug it off.

Westlake is a great writer - which makes this a dangerous book. It is impossible not to empathise - and therefore suffer alongside - Cole. From chapter to chapter, Cole's life becomes an increasingly Kafka-esque struggle, and the reader is dragged alongside him every stumbling step of the way.

This is an exceptional and painful book. It is the essence of noir without a hint of crime - one man's unceasing, provocative struggle to make good in a relentlessly grim world.

When author Donald E. Westlake died at the end of 2008, he left only one unpublished novel, Memory, which he had written early in his career (sometime in the '60s), but which was rejected by his agent for being "too literary" (i.e., unsellable). So, it was put in his files and never saw the light of day.

With the assistance of Lawrence Block and Abby Adams (Mrs. Westlake), Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime has made Memory available now for all the Westlake fans who've been clamoring for one more book from the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster.

Paul Cole, a road company actor in a touring Broadway hit, stops off for some midnight fun after that night's show. While in flagrante delicto, her husband storms in and brains Paul with a chair, putting him in the hospital and knocking the sense right out of his head. He can't remember much for any significant length of time.

Cole struggles every day just to survive: to work and make money so he can get back to New York and try to find his old life again. But things like room and board, food, and a general inability because of regular expenses keep him stuck. He tries to make notes when he remember bits and pieces, but when he returns to the notes later, they don't seem to mean anything anymore. How can you buy a bus ticket if you don't remember why you were putting aside the money in the first place? And Paul is always fearful that he will forget something important, like to go to work, but daily events settle into a routine and they get a little bit easier for a while.

Then the police come for him....

Memory is a great book, and I write this without reservation. It outshines anything else Westlake has done and makes his intricately plotted Dortmunder and Parker novels seem like silly trifles. I'll even go so far as to say that from now on, every Westlake book will be compared to it, every fan defined by their appreciation of it. ("You like Westlake? Have you read Memory?") How ironic that such an early book could end his career on such a pinnacle of achievement.

The real beauty is how Westlake takes the reader along as if we are on the business end of a leash. Everything Paul feels, we feel (torpor, joy, happiness, confusion, fear), only with the extra knowledge of an outsider, adding suspense to the mix. Since Paul doesn't know what to expect, neither do we, though we desperately want to find out, so we watch with breathless anticipation as he continues on his path toward the rediscovery of Paul Cole. It's tragic to watch Memory unfold, as Cole takes a step forward only to fall behind again, but utterly compelling in a voyeuristic way.

It's almost a good thing that Memory was not published back when it was written, because given the author's reputation for short crime novels, it likely would not have seen print at its full 360-page length. And I imagine that one of the scenes that would have been cut -- because it does little to further the plot and adds nothing to the character -- is also one of my favorites. Showing Paul looking for work, with no documentable past, lets Westlake make a wry stab at employment offices who demand efficiency while making it difficult to accomplish due to their interest in doing things just so.

And maybe it's also a good thing because, if Memory had been published in the 1960s, Westlake's career might have gone in a different direction. We may have never met Dortmunder or Parker and would know the author instead for his increasingly weighty philosophical novels on the human condition, with crime novels merely something he did "in the early days" (and tried not to talk about too much). Or maybe he would have disappeared altogether. Who knows? What's important is that it is being published now. Forgive the pun, but Memory is unforgettable.

I have read every novel Westlake has ever written, and this was by far the worst. It's hard to believe he actually wrote this one. The main character is uninteresting; the setup is unbelievable; the plot is nearly nonexistant; page after page goes by and NOTHING happens. Westlake's idea here may have been interesting as a 5000-word short story, but as a 300+ page novel, it in painfully tedious. The same thing happens to the main character over and over and over again; nothing changes. There is not one interesting character or scene in the entire novel. After page 100, I had to force myself to trudge through the rest of the book, merely out of loyalty to Westlake and all the wonderful, funny, creative novels he has written over the decades. I kept waiting for this book to get the least bit interesting. It never does.

Save yourself the time, money, and inevitable disappointment and skip this book. Westlake has to be turning over in his grave that this piece of junk ever got published. What a horrible ending to a terrific career.

A man gets a blow to the head, giving him massive amnesia. As he struggles to reassemble his life, the condition worsens.

I gather this was a very early novel of Westlake's (from internal context, I'd say it was penned in the early '60s) written before he found his "voice." Missing from this is the dark humor of the Dortmunder series and the tight plots of Parker. Instead, we have 360 pages of blow-by-blow descriptions of the mundane as the protagonist stumbles through life. Very little actually happens in this book, and what little that does crawls by. I have no problems with books that have a slow, brooding pace--if that fits the feel. Here it does not. This means that the book, despite a mildly intriguing premise, ends up being drab, dull, and boring.

I kept debating if I wanted to finish it, and half way through I was consciously aware that I was forcing myself through in hope that it would get better or that there would be some sort of payoff by the finale. There wasn't.

It's possible I missed something in all this: I actually suspect Westlake was making an attempt to explore the question of "what makes us 'us'?" If so, it was a superficial treatment at best, or (more likely) just a failed experiment.

You can skip this one, unless you're a Westlake maniac with OCD who wants to read everything of his. In that aspect, it'll probably make you appreciate his other stuff more.

Memory, an early, unpublished manuscript by the late great Donald E. Westlake, is a brilliantly written character study of what losing one's memory really means. In too many books and movies, the amnesiac hero is a romantic figure, surrounded by loving and supportive friends and doctors; in such stories, the amnesia is little more than a mystery to be solved. But, as Westlake shows, loss of memory is really a loss of self, of knowledge, of ability, of friends, of family, of what and who we are. It is an involuntary rebirth. In portraying a man who has lost his memory, Westlake delves into what memory does for us: it is our imagination, our creativity, our reality, for without our memories, what are we? More importantly, who are we?

Paul awakes with no memory after being assaulted with a chair by a cuckholded husband. After recovering in a hospital he is ushered out of town by an indignant detective who holds a low view of touring actors--which Paul happens to be. He lands in a small town where he finds a job, makes friends, becomes a kind of substitute son to his landlords, and even finds love. But he is haunted by his past, by who he "really" is. He finally decides to return to New York, guided by information in his wallet, to an apartment, friends, an agent, his acting profession, all of which he remembers only vaguely, as in a dream. What happens to him there and what he eventually decides to do next is heartbreaking.

In Memory, Donald Westlake has created a harrowing portrait of what it is to be lost, as a child is lost, without the resources that we depend on every day to find our way back. Written early in his career but not published (possibly because of its themes and denouement) Memory may be Westlake's masterpiece.

Donald Westlake was an amazing writer. Of the 64 Hard Case Crime books published thus far, Westlake has been well represented by 361, The Cutie, and Somebody Owes Me Money, but his last novel, Memory, is equally remarkable.

As other reviewers have noted, this is noir without crime, but not without the struggles and conflicts that characterize great literature. Part time actor Paul Cole is beaten after an affair by a jealous husband and from there he begins his journey back 'home'. Decidedly not glamourous, his life rebuilds from a shattered mental frame which never quite synced again. Today, we cannot understand what stigma a victim with amensiac episodes would have suffered, but Westlake explores a life not well lived.

Engrossing, "Memory" is a suitable tribute to a grand master author we have been privileged to enjoy.

Paul Cole is a New York actor, on the road in an unspecified locale that's a long way from Manhattan. He beds a beautiful woman, is discovered by her husband and is beaten with a chair. He survives the beating (the husband agrees to pay half of his medical bills) but suffers severe memory loss. The syndrome includes some partial amnesia as well as short-term memory loss. Paul must somehow put his life back together by searching the records of his past and making elaborate notes concerning his every step (so that, for example, he can find his way from place to place and remind himself of appointments).

The result is a fascinating book about the nature and importance of memory and our utter dependency on it. Paul cannot afford to return to New York after his (deserved) beating, but he becomes a sympathetic character because of his plight. We watch him as he searches for employment and struggles to save enough money for a bus ticket home.

The starkness of his situation results in a stark narrative. At times we wonder whether the book is some sort of allegory. Is Paul really in hell? Purgatory? Has he stumbled into the Twilight Zone? And, thus, we ask ourselves what it is that we are reading--a crime story? A supernatural story? A psychological thriller? A realistic exploration of something that could happen to any of us?

By the end of the book we will discover the answer to that question and the answer will not be to everyone's liking. It has been said that there are two kinds of endings--happy endings and endings from which we learn something, happily. Both are possibilities here. Personally, I found the book riveting. Presumably it is a trunk novel that Westlake couldn't publish when it was written, but the time in which it was written (when men labored for a dollar an hour and dined on pie) is richly evocative. We have walked into the world of James M. Cain and other classic noir writers.

Readers will note that the book is receiving very mixed responses from Amazon reviewers. While it will not be to everyone's taste this is Donald Westlake's last book, an ambitious book of nearly 400 pp. and a bargain from Hard Case Crime. Check it out.

This book was NOT Donald Westlake's last novel. It is the last one published,
but it was written in the early 60's and Westlake was about 28 years old. It was not
published, at that time, as it was not considered commercial enough. It isn't now.
It is a beautifully written, sensitive narrative, of a young man, Paul Cole, who was
beaten physically and lost his memories of the past. He becomes his own investigator
as he follows the threads that lead to his old self.
His tools are few, as he leans heavily on his intuition and all of his senses, as he
reads the people and the situations he finds himself in. It is in its way a story of
courage and heroism. A person who makes the most of what he finds left of his
life.

I know others are frustrated as this is not what they expect at all, from this author.
That, and the fact that it is a Hard Case Crime publication. The illustration on the
cover also doesn't help.

This book will stay in your memory as there is not another like it.

Got this from the library two days ago and couldn't put it down. The first little bit slogs (the character of the detective is wooden) but the rest of the book soars. The other reviews do a great job of synopsis so I won't continue. I was up until 2am reading this and started again at 8am this morning and didn't stop until I was done. The last book I did that for was "Sister Carrie" and they are hauntingly similar. Three words: read this book.

I put off reading Memory for a while. Having read all of Westlake's previous novels over the years, I knew when this was done, the great adventures, characters, tales, and just enjoyment that Westlake's stories produce, was going to be over for ever. Donald E Westlake died in December 2008, and unless some other unpublished book turns up somewhere, Memory is the final Westlake experience we the readers will have. Well new experience anyway, as his many masterpieces will be read over and over again throughout a lifetime. So anyway Memory, it's not my all time favourite Westlake novel, but it is as good, and well written, as any of them.

Published by Hard Case Crime may have many believing this will be a crime caper, simply due to the publisher's name. We're not along for the ride during the planning and implementing of a crime, instead we go along for the ride, inside the head of the victim of a violent crime. Paul Cole, a travelling actor, is brutally bashed around the head with a chair in a cowardly attack while in bed with a woman. Paul doesn't get justice though, as the police officer assigned to bring it to him is a moral extremist, and since Paul was sleeping with a married woman, all the officer wants is to run Paul out of town. Even when Paul asks about the welfare of the woman (whom he will soon forget) the officer is still insistent that the husband has done nothing wrong. Further crimes lead by the bully cop hinder Paul getting his life on track, he is discharged before he medically should be from the hospital, and the final pay cheque which included money to get him safely back to New York just happens to be just about the exact same figure as the hospital bill. Paul is dragged to the bus station but of course does not have enough money to get to anywhere near New York and can only afford to go two towns closer. He knows he must get a job to survive, and save to afford the trip home, but unhelpful bureaucrats make that a difficult task. With a worsening memory problem he finds he is forgetting not only why he is in the town, but what he ever did before coming there. It is only the ID in his wallet and some notes he has been leaving himself before he goes to sleep each night, that hold some clues, however he hasn't been completely clear in all the notes so many are just confusing. When a visit from some men in a car leave him with fast fading memories of what it was all about, but everlasting nightly nightmares of a shiny metal bar, Paul knows he must make it back to New York as surely once there his friends and surroundings will help him know who he is and what he needs to do.

A great novel, where you experience the fear, highs and lows through Paul Cole's eyes.

By the way if you're into the whole memory loss crime novel genre check out Retirement Homes Are Murder by Mike Befeler, where a resident who wakes up each morning with no memory of the recent past has to solve the mystery of who is murdering his neighbours before he becomes the next victim.

If Memory was your first Westlake novel you've got a lot of great reading in front of you. Great standalone comic capers like The Spy in the Ointment, Cops and Robbers, Smoke and my all time favourite Help, I am being held prisoner are masterpieces you must check out, along with of course the Dortmunder series. Non comic capers such as the sensational solution to unemployment - The Ax are also must reads. Hard crime such as the Parker novels under the pen name Richard Stark await your reading pleasure in fact Westlake could write over many genres including a Western (Gangway) and even science fiction with novels such as Anarchaos. Thanks for the memories Mr Westlake!