Customer Reviews

You Lost Me There

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Bruce Willis. Die Hard. "Moonlighting"


How often do you run into Mr. Willis and his oeuvre in literary fiction? He may not appear frequently (maybe not at all) yet he fits in perfectly with this substantial and insightful novel about memor by Rosecrans Baldwin. You Lost Me There is a complicated story, with twists and surprises and feinted paths, as well as scientific details about disease and the research to fight it. Beyond the serious details, it is a fun novel as well, thus Bruce Willis references prevail throughout the story and with surprising relevancy.


"Years in the past, someone thought my wife was a knockout, one night long ago in a restaurant. A night I didn't remember."

So realizes Victor Aaron, a brilliant scientist who is now realizing just how ignorant he's been. In the time since his wife's fatal car accident, he's been lost and unable to find his way, too young to retire but too old to feel any real enthusiasm for his life or work. As a scientist researching Alzheimer's disease, he's enthralled with the concept of memory and works to find a cure. His work gives him opportunities to study case histories on how the brain is wired, and the novel doesn't hesitate to dip into scientific explanations. That the memory specialist is unable to recall much about his wife, anything accurate, is a puzzle he needs to solve.

He stumbles upon note cards that his wife had written, as suggested by a marriage counselor they had hired, in an effort to stall what appeared to be an inevitable divorce. Their marriage had become a quiet battle of pathos versus logos, with a bit of ethos thrown in by crazy Aunt Betsy. Aunt Betsy appears to be the voice of balance in the novel, even though she is described by Victor as "an amateur anthropologist... [who] studied misbehavior. She tracked her stories doggedly and did not hesitate to use them."

Victor is most astonished by how his wife Sara describes him in her note cards: "He was so focused on research and making a name for himself that we were landlocked by his lab schedule, him at sea and me in the window." She had a successful career, as did he, they were wealthy, and he didn't see a problem in their marriage that couldn't be fixed without him simply apologizing. That his apologies were vague and noncommittal didn't occur to him, and as he continues to read her notes he realizes how differently he and she had interpreted significant events in their lives.

However, the story doesn't limit itself to their marital discord, which would probably be a really sappy novel that would ultimately be a bore, and then a television movie. Instead, Baldwin goes deeper into what memories Victor has, from a childhood friend's suicide to his closest friend's obvious creepiness. It's as if seeing his wife Sara's version of himself has freed him to reexamine himself from other angles. Yet you can't be lulled into thinking this is a fable that ends with everyone awakened to their flaws and eager to change. Can you change who you are if you can't remember what you've been?

"I didn't want to remember that evening ever again. Wipe the synapses clean with some scotch and a hard sleep."

Baldwin creates a thriller-like pace, and he weaves in details such as the "We Will Never Forget" bumper stickers of 9/11, and how in placing them on cars, people are essentially admitting that they need to be reminded. Victor admits to not remembering the name of a movie that was the centerpiece of their first date, and Baldwin uses this to contrast how there are often so many little things we remember while the more important details slip away. Even more fascinating, though, is how Baldwin portrays different characters in the phases of wanting to remember or trying to forget.

Because this doesn't attempt to sew up all the details neatly, it would probably be a great film. I'd bet the movie rights are already sold. The question is, is there a role for Bruce Willis?

In the isolated Soborg Institute off the coast of Maine, obsessive geneticist Victor Aaron works tirelessly to make a breakthrough in Alzheimer's research with his capable, motley crew of colleagues. Since his wife, Sara, died several years ago, he has walled himself off emotionally from relationships, frustrating his twenty-five year-old girlfriend, Regina, a research fellow and budding poet. He is fifty-eight and suffering from impotence. She is a potent, burlesque-loving young woman that dances naked for him on their routine weekly rendezvous. They keep a regular regimen of Fridays and a secret email exchange at work.

Victor's links to his dead wife include a series of index cards that she left behind, detailing the various vectors of their thirty-odd year marriage, and her octogenarian Aunt Betsy, the bellicose island doyenne. He pencils in a regular Friday supper with Aunt Betsy following his Friday afternoon failures with Regina. He compartmentalizes his relationships and quarantines his heart, wallowing in melancholy over his loss. The troubled arc of his marriage left a wake of unsettled issues that Victor is trying to stitch together from their memories. Sara's index cards tell a story that threatens to unhinge him completely.

The novel contains some elaborate observations on life, particularly memories.
"Some theories said the most accurate memory was one that's never recalled. The more the mind retells a story, the more that story hardens into a basic shape, where by remembering one detail we push ten others below the surface and construct the memory touch by touch. A sculpture between the neurons that looks like its model, just not completely."

As a philosophical writer of tart reflections, Baldwin has a pungent flair. However, the story was often fuzzy and unfocused, as it lurched from character to character, from scene to scene. Likewise, this eccentric cast of oddballs was self-consciously overplayed. They were a little too quirky and frenzied, as if the author was trying to fill a weak story with ambient noise. The narrative felt boggy and bleary, and I was routinely impatient to return to the examination of Victor and Sara's marriage. The book needs some crisp editing; the story tends to become either repetitive and muddy or windy and discursive. Also, a dark and defining event in Victor's past was too affectedly reminiscent of a scene out of Pump up the Volume.

The narrative thrust declines when Aunt Betsy's son, Joel, a background character during most of the story, is corralled to front and center during the final stretch of the novel. Once the climax is reached--an over-the-top but ultimately enervating experience--the story continues tonelessly with Joel and his transgressions. He was the least engaging character of all, presented wearily as the stock alcoholic. The story's indulgence into Joel became tedious to read, and I often lost interest.

Baldwin's freshman effort does show promising talent, but it suffers from the flaws of many debut novels. The jacket cover describes this book as "dazzling." Honestly, dazzling it is not. It lacks focus and rhythm and suffers from structural jam and story caulking. But I admire Baldwin's offbeat wisdom and and I suspect he will refine his craft with time.

I found this story, about an Alzheimer's researcher and the wife he lost in a car accident, not only interesting but touching. It is not a happy story nor, for me, was it a weepy one. At it's core, it was the story of a man who knows all about the brain but little about emotion. In fact, a wounded ex-girlfriend accuses him of having "Alzheimer's of the emotions."

Victor spent his life so consumed with his work that the rest of his life went on without him; except he doesn't realize it. He thinks he had a good life and a happy (if sometimes troubled) marriage. After his wife dies in an accident, he finds notes she had left behind--not TO him, but ABOUT him--an exercise assigned by a marriage counseler they'd seen in the past.

Through these cards, Victor realizes that his life, his wife, his marriage...none of it was what he thought it was. Here, this expert in the brain and its memories comes to the jarring realization that his recollections about his wife, Sara, their marriage and particular events in their lives may not be accurate. This revelation, as well as some of the profoundly hurtful things Sara says about him on the cards, shake him to the core and magnify the grief of her loss.

I usually have a hard time getting through a book where some characters are so unlikeable but, for whatever reason, that didn't bother me much in this book (though Aunt Betsy did get on my nerves). Unlike a lot of books I've read this year, the cast of characters here is blessedly short--only about half a dozen. They are all colorful and flawed characters--some more than others.

The writing is quite good, and keeps the story flowing very well. I never had a problem staying interested in this story--I was always eager to pick it up from the nightstand. Be prepared for this story to make you think about whether your relationships are really as they seem.

Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel, perfectly intertwines smart, sophisticated insights into the human psyche with quirky, offbeat characters that are so real you feel like you know them.

The narrative follows the life of Victor, a widowed Alzheimer's researcher as he stumbles through his halted career, failed relationships and inability to mourn for his wife. Victor discovers a series of notecards that document his wife's memories from their marriage, leaving Victor completely unhinged at the realization that his own memories are unreliable. The people that touch his life along the way--including his eccentric Aunt Betsey, hippie goddaughter, and artsy lover Regina--are incredibly human and relatable in their all their flaws and idiosyncrasies.

You won't want to put this one down.

For me to become involved in a novel, I need to make some connection with the characters. They have to seem real and believable to me, though not necessarily likable or even interesting.

Mr. Baldwin's main character, Victor, an esteemed Alzheimers researcher mourning the death of his wife, is none of these things. Maybe if he were mourning more deeply, I'd have some sympathy for him. But instead he's having weekly assignations with Regina, a burlesque-loving co-worker who performs for him as La Loulou, and inviting his nubile goddaughter to live with him.

Victor, Regina, frat-boy friend Russell, eccentric aunt Betsy -- everyone in this novel is a caricature. The only character I felt any connection to is Sara, and she's dead. I skipped through the novel looking for the notes she wrote on 3 x 5 cards about her marriage -- novellas, really! -- as a therapy exercise.

From what I gather, I'm supposed to be interested in the way Victor and Sara viewed their marriage through different lenses. I was looking forward to a "he said, she said" sort of mental parry. But mostly Victor doesn't remember anything about his marriage. He seems as vacant as the dementia patients he is devoting his life to. Maybe that's the point, but it didn't make for gripping reading.

Mr. Baldwin's book didn't have anything meaningful to say to me about the grief of a surviving spouse. I read it in the same weekend as Katherine Shonk's Happy Now? and there's no comparison. Ms. Shonk's novel rang true for me, a finely observed tale of grief and healing. It and Juliette Fay's Shelter Me would be more satisfying reads.

First, let's talk about the prose. On a sentence by witty, heartbreaking sentence level, few debut novels can match You Lost Me There. Think Goodbye, Columbus, but this time in the voice of a grieving middle-aged neuroscientist in Maine. The book is less a conventional novel than a pointillist portrait of one man dealing with the complexities of love lost. Victor Aaron had separated from his wife; then, just as they were feeling their way toward reconciliation, she is killed in a car wreck. Childless, Aaron searches through for some sort of surrogate, whether it's his wife's aunt, his colleagues, or his best friend's daughter. At the same time, as a neuroscientist specializing in Alzheimer's, Aaron wonders and worries about his own mental mortality, and what it will mean for the memories he so desperately needs to keep. Baldwin's effortless insights into grief, memory, and friendship are astounding for someone so young. This is the mark of great writing -- a fun, easy story on the surface, but underneath a deep reserve of ideas the reader can dip into and out of as he wishes.

True, like all first novels there are some rough edges; a few of the supporting characters don't have enough dimensionality. But they're still fun and interesting. And Baldwin avoids the typical mark of the beginning novelist, namely a well-polished first chapter or two (probably what they used to sell the book) followed by 200 pages of thrashing about, looking for some way to fulfill the early chapters' promise. Baldwin dances around that trap like a prima ballerina, keeping the wit, pace, and reader's attention from start to finish.

I got this at our local library but have already ordered a copy for my personal library. My first inclination on finishing this book was to read it again. I love Baldwin's writing, his story-characters-timeline-style... I've recommended it to friends and reviewed it on my First Paragraphs blog.

Rosecrans Baldwin is a name to remember. The first book from this author is amazing! At once accessible yet intellectual, this book shows how we can have intelligent prose without all the flowery, wordy tomes of the big names in "literary fiction" (you know - the books you are told you are SUPPOSED to like). For me, this is one of the top 10 best books of 2010. An EXCELLENT debut.

If you're like me and you're getting a little weary of the big highfalutin New York novel, this is definitely your bag. The setting is in beautiful coastal Maine, and the characters--in a refreshing twist!--actually behave a lot like real people.

I read this in only a few short sittings while on vacation, and I was stunned at how deftly it was able to cram in all its interesting tidbits about memory and Alzheimer's disease while still keeping me going with a compelling story. The main character Victor Aaron might seem a little passive at first, but anyone who's dealt with such a huge loss will recognize himself in the way Aaron slowly comes unraveled. And the parts from the wife's perspective... just some exquisite writing.

The prose is at times very spare--something I attribute to the author's unwillingness to engage in fancifulness. In this way it isn't a book that will destroy you with a single line, it's more of a book that will enter you whole and then gestate slowly for weeks afterward. It did for me, anyway.

Yep, loved it.

The premise sounds promising: a middle aged scientist has lost his wife in a car accident. He finds notes she made about their marriage, which war with his own views, and force him to ponder the past.
But the execution is poor. I had to reread many conversations in order to figure out who was speaking. Isn't indicating who is speaking a basic literary skill? Should it take several rereads and careful parsing to ascertain?
And I realized as I read that I've reached my limit for reading male wish fulfillment fantasies. The nearing 60 protagonist, a dull scientist with not much to say for himself, is pursued by a 25 year old beauty who dances burlesque for him (and him alone)! Apparently she loves him. Sorry, I can take no more of these unbelievable couplings that only men who've watched too many Hollywood movies could find realistic.