A Bit Too Quiet

I sort of skim-read Nicole Krauss's Man Walks into a Room back some four years ago when I was supervising an extended essay on the text by one of my students. I knew I'd read it with the minimum of genuine attention - just enough to give me a sense of what the writer was up to - and that I wasn't in any way close to doing it justice. So I mentally referenced the need to get back to the novel one day and see whether it was as impressive as it seemed on a very superficial reading.

I finished it yesterday having rendered it the engagement it deserves and can now answer that question with a splendidly equivocal: yes & no. Yes, because at the sentence by sentence level it impresses in terms of a readably balanced style fusing the poetic and prosaic, and the dialogue, of which there is plenty, works, achieving engaging believability and a sense of genuine individual voices. No, because somehow the narrative loses direction once the protagonist, who's entirely lost his adult memory as the novel begins, has someone else's memory implanted in him and sort of goes on the run. Except he isn't really on the run from the medical facility he's been in for the experiment as this isn't a bit of genre-fiction of the Stephen King school, but a literary novel in which nothing terribly dramatic is ever going to happen, despite what seems to me a wonderfully Kingian premise for the tale.

In my dotage it seems I want plot for the sake of plot. I'm losing my sense of the finer things in literature, I suppose because I've experienced so much of them. Yes, that's it. I can appreciate the idea of exploring the relationship between memory and identity in a quiet way, but prefer something louder to buck me up.