The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block

The Barnes & Noble Review

"In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting," the psychologist and philosopher William James has written. James meant that we need to be able to select out important detail from irrelevant, lest our minds be cluttered with useless information. In a more general sense, we consider a certain amount of amnesia a necessary and productive thing. Who can move forward if they are mired in the past, nursing old wounds and focusing on their failures? In his brilliantly audacious debut novel, Stefan Merrill Block imagines characters on opposite ends of this spectrum -- some crippled by their inability to forget, others entering into the childlike bliss of unknowing, because they suffer from a rare disease known as early-onset Alzheimer’s.

This unique illness, given a fictional genetic variant called EOA-23 in Block’s telling, causes men and women as young as 30 to begin losing their memory. The decline is part of a more general disintegration, which comes to affect the entire body. As the 15-year-old Seth reads in a medical book, after learning that his mother, Jamie, has been diagnosed, "it’s not just memories that people with my mom’s disease forget but, increasingly basic things. How to write, how to speak, how to walk, how to sit up, how to swallow, how to breathe, and -- eventually, after five to seven years -- how to stay alive." Seth, a bright but socially inept boy who always believed he would grow up to be a scientist, decides that he must learn everything he can about the disease and which of his ancestors were afflicted with it, in part to determine whether he himself will succumb to it. Seth is hampered in this quest by Jamie’s long-standing refusal to divulge any information about her past, even her maiden name. "My life started when you were born," is all she will reveal to her frustrated son.

Jamie and Seth live in a suburb of Austin, but when the novel first opens it is a different world the reader is thrust into -- that of an old, humpbacked man named Abel, marooned on a farm outside Dallas. Abel eats only what he can grow on his ten-acre estate and rides a spindly horse named Iona down paved streets cluttered with McMansions. Abel is a holdout, pestered by his neighbors with letters containing phrases such as "eminent domain" and taunted by the local children, who dare each other to run up and touch his hump. In contrast to Jamie, Abel’s problem is that he remembers too much; his days are passed in a ceaseless unwinding of a history he would like to forget. There is the daughter he fathered in secret with his brother Paul's wife and allowed to be raised as if she were Paul’s child. (Paul’s wife, Mae, was complicit in the deceit, because she was in love with Abel.) There is the fact that this daughter -- who soon comes to be Abel’s only living family -- abandons him when she learns the truth about Paul, who was losing his memory at the time he and Mae were killed in a car crash. Abel refuses to leave his farm because he hopes that his daughter will one day return there, and the well-built suspense in Block’s novel comes from the realization of how this yearning will intersect with Seth’s mission.

Block employs a medley of voices in his book, including clinical sections in which Seth charts the progress of his research into EOA-23 (an entire page is taken up with a sequence of letters that constitute a genetic code, "the strange lexicon of nucleic acid") and wistful, fairy-tale interludes in which Jamie tells Seth about an imaginary place called Isidora, a land where "no one can remember anything." The stories of Isidora have been passed down through Jamie’s family for generations, and though they initially summon a paradise of sorts, a place where "you always have whatever it is you need," as the novel progresses they become as twisted and entangled as Jamie’s memory. Residents of the peaceful land go to war after a new arrival introduces the concept of sadness to them, a sadness that -- it is suggested -- occurs because of the ability to remember. The effect of putting such different voices in conjunction is that it demonstrates the contrasting ways memory can work. Block suggests that memory can be methodical and linear, as in the interviews Seth conducts with every EOA-23 sufferer he can locate in Texas, or it can function more like an associative web, whereby loosely linked themes and images recall similar ones. (Jamie’s fanciful tales put one in the mind of the White Queen’s remark to Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: "It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.") In spite of their dissimilarity Block successfully unites these stories by the novel’s end, in a reunion scene that shows how identity is both bound and freed by memory.

Block’s prose is not without a few rough spots, as might be both anticipated and excused, in a debut of such intricacy. Although various clues suggest that he was born in the 1930s, Abel often speaks in a voice that sounds overly antiquated, almost 19th-century in style. He invokes biblical language that at times seems affected: "Sometimes, it is almost as if the mythos of Original Sin was purposefully recast on our little farm...my own hunchbacked, pilose body poorly cast" and at other times corny: "Into the endless oeuvre of the sacred number three, whose work spans from the Holy Trinity through Poseidon’s trident to the three-bean salad, we added ourselves." There is at least one moment -- when Seth is able to gain online access to a confidential database, simply by clicking the word "admin" and guessing a password -- where the plot feels contrived.

But these are minor lapses in a story that is otherwise filled with inventiveness and beauty. Block’s metaphors are particularly remarkable, for instance, when Abel’s decaying white farmhouse is compared to "an old man’s stubborn, final molar" and the chromosomal mutation that initiates EOA-23 is described as "a jacket’s zipper pulled up too quickly in a frigid gust, which is only one or two teeth away from its original, intended configuration." Equally stunning is the succinct manner in which Block establishes Seth’s teenage awkwardness by noting that he calls himself as a "Master of Nothingness." Seth then explains that "by Nothingness, I mean this: I could find a place in a classroom that was perhaps not the farthest to the back but was simply the place where I was least likely to be noticed." Near the story’s end Seth registers the simultaneous joy and disappointment that sometimes occurs, when one finally experiences a longed-for event: "It was like watching a film version of a well-loved book, the excitement of seeing a thing that has existed only in your imagination suddenly materialized into reality, with the supplementary sadness that from that moment on you’ll never be able to imagine it any way other than how it appeared before you."

A novelist faces a similar balancing act: seal off your book too completely, and there’s no room for the reader to bring her own experiences to it; leave things too open-ended, and there’s no sense of gratification and resolve. Block negotiates this dilemma expertly, with a story of a unique condition -- the loss of memory -- which manages to seem both moving and universal. --Andrea Walker

Andrea Walker is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. Her reviews have appeared in Bookforum, The Hartford Courant, and the Times Literary Supplement.

From the Publisher

In Stefan Merrill Blocka (TM)s extraordinary debut, three narratives intertwine to create a story that is by turns funny, smart, introspective, and revelatory.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Mr. Block has found an unusually roundabout, fanciful way of telling the story of one family's genetic destiny. And The Story of Forgetting does not confine its eccentricity to the distant past. Nothing about Mr. Block's narrative is predictable or even suitably bleak, given the nature of the illness he addresses. Early-onset Alzheimer's disease, made grimmer by the new scientific certitude of genetic testing, is at the heart of this emotional roller coaster of a novel…The Story of Forgetting is a fresh, beguiling novel in what is sure to be the rapidly expanding genre of Alzheimer's literature.

Publishers Weekly

Patrick Lawlor reads the precocious Block's first novel with two markedly different voices for its two protagonists. The hunchbacked, memory-obsessed Abel Haggard is given a broad Southern accent that remains remarkably precise, considering its exaggerated pitch, and Seth Waller, the teenager trapped in an unhappy family, in search of an explanation for his mother's mysterious illness, receives a much flatter, less remarkable, even reading. Lawlor's technique swiftly and easily divides the book's two halves, but his Abel rapidly grows painful to listen to as he is too exaggerated to be much more than a stereotype. Sounding neither convincing nor mellifluous, Lawlor's Abel holds back this otherwise solid audiobook. A Random House hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 4). (July)

School Library Journal

Adult/High School

This riveting novel features well-drawn characters engaged in the epic struggle of finding purpose and meaning in life. Early-onset/familial Alzheimer's disease (EOA) is the launching point for an exploration of memory and the human condition. Fifteen-year-old Seth and 70-year-old Abel alternate as sympathetic narrators of their family's stories. Although they don't meet until the end of the book, the connection between them becomes apparent early on. When Seth's mother is diagnosed with EOA, he assigns himself the task of learning all he can about the disease. Meanwhile, Abel reflects on his past, including his family's struggles with EOA, as he resists encroaching suburban sprawl and waits for the return of his long-gone daughter. The author effectively interweaves several writing styles: historical fiction (the imagined origins of the disease in a medieval English village and its subsequent spread to America); scientific inquiry (explanations of genetics and psychological studies of the brain); fantasy (tales of the mysterious land of Isidora, an alternate world known only to EOA families); Abel's reflective reminiscences; and Seth's coming-of-age in contemporary Texas. The narrators tell painful, funny, heartbreaking stories in authentic voices. An author's note indicates that the novel is semiautobiographical and provides resources for further information about the disease. In addition to being an excellent read, this book would be a wonderful supplement to a psychology class studying memory, or a biology class learning about genetics.-Sondra VanderPloeg, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH

Kirkus Reviews

Two men, generations apart, try to understand the mystery of Alzheimer's in 24-year-old Brooklyn-based author Block's debut novel. How do individuals make sense of a disease that robs loved ones of their memories and, ultimately, of life? That's the question facing Seth Walker, a smart and sensitive teenager who is trying to cope as his mother declines into a rare early-onset form of Alzheimer's. His father is no help, sinking into his own gin-soaked decline. Only the stories his mother told of the mythical land of Isidora seem to have any relevance, depicting a land where the lack of memory is a blessing and all live in the constant presence of perfect happiness. Those stories are shared by another loner, an elderly hunchback named Abel Haggard, who also heard them from his mother. Abel, whose losses are physical, lives on the shrinking remnants of his family farm. A full life, he feels, has been denied him because of his handicap. His adored, physically fit twin, Paul, came back from the Army emotionally impaired by tragedy. And while the love of his life, Paul's wife Mae, briefly returned his passions, she too withdrew, overcome by guilt. He has even lost his daughter, Jamie, who has fled to New York City. Although only ever acknowledged as Jamie's uncle, Abel helped raise the girl, teaching her to read and, in the process, telling her the stories of Isidora. While the connection between these two stories becomes obvious early on, what makes this novel special is Block's grasp of the emotional devastation wrought by Alzheimer's. For family members, the disease presents a mystifying withdrawal, "a full reversal of a life," as a known, loved individual slips away. Rather than beingsaccharine, the shared sweetness of the Isidora stories, interspersed between chapters as we learn of their roots, highlight the melancholy that must accompany even the closest bonds once this disease has struck. A sensitive fictional interpretation of family tragedy. Agent: Bill Clegg/William Morris Agency

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Reading Group Guide

Abel Haggard is an elderly hunchback who haunts the remnants of his family’s farm in the encroaching shadow of the Dallas suburbs, adrift in recollections of those he loved and lost long ago. Hundreds of miles to the south, in Austin, Seth Waller is a teenage “Master of Nothingness”—a prime specimen of that gangly breed of adolescent that vanishes in a puff of sarcasm at the slightest threat of human contact. When his mother is diagnosed with a rare disease, Seth sets out on a quest to find her lost relatives and uncover the truth of her genetic history. Though neither knows of the other’s existence, Abel and Seth are linked by a dual legacy: the disease that destroys the memories of those they love, and the story of Isidora—a land without memory where nothing is ever possessed, so nothing can be lost.

Blending myth, science, and dazzling storytelling, Stefan Merrill Block’s extraordinary first novel illuminates the hard-learned truth that only through the loss of what we consider precious can we understand the value of what remains.

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