Joyce Carol Oates: The Man Without a Shadow
“She meets him, she falls in love. He
forgets her.”
These are opening words of the latest
novel of Joyce Carol Oates (heaven knows how many previous ones there have
been).
The line is repeated twice more, and
the paragraph ends as follows:
“At last she says goodbye to him, thirty-one
years after they’ve first met. On his deathbed, he has forgotten her.”
‘He’ is Elihu Hoopes, scion of a
wealthy Philadelphia family, who lost his ability to remember anything for more
than a minute or so at the age of thirty-seven as a result of an attack of
encephalitis. He retains, however, his ability to remember events prior to his
illness.
‘She’ is Margot Sharpe, who is a newly
arrived graduate student in neuropsychology laboratory.—the prestigious ‘memory’ lab,
led by the famous Professor Milton Ferris. And her career from graduate student
to fully tenured professor, author of article after article on memory and
amnesia, and winner of numerous high honors, centers her whole life on Elihu
Hoopes, "E.H." as he is referred to in all the experiments and studies of his
amnesia that she conducts. And, yes, she falls desperately in love with him, to
the point of near-madness.
The focus is on the two of them (with a
small cast of walk-on parts). Margot Sharpe pursuing her career and her deep
attachment to E.H., who drifts back into his past over and over again, as if
searching to solve the mystery of a traumatic event.
And the underlying question throughout
the book is what makes us who we are: and what is the role that memory plays in forming who we are. Clearly, the author has done a great deal of research on the subject before writing the book.
The writing is terrific—you are
completely drawn in to the narrative and to the inner lives of the two main
characters, although there is certain sense of repetition--sometimes a feeling, as you
read, ‘surely we’ve gone over all this before?’ Maybe an editor is too scared
to try to get J.C. Oates to think of whittling the book down a bit…
This a quote from a reviewer
called Ryan Vastelica:
“The Man Without A Shadow is the kind
of work that can inspire endless analysis and discussion, because the question
it probes is really at the heart of the human experience: who are we, really?
It is said you never really know another person, and this is doubly true if the
other person is literally unable to know himself. Many times Sharpe is caught
off guard by how stubbornly insistent Hoopes’ condition remains, her emotions
easily trumping her scientific mind. Oates is canny and devastating in how she
unveils a universal experience from the unique dynamic of her leads."
Another review was critical of the
sub-plot in which Hoopes is looking back to childhood and trying to unravel his
traumatic experience, and I would agree that this does not really add much to
the central relationship between Margot Sharpe and E.H., although the reader is
intrigued and wants the mystery to be unraveled.
Thoroughly recommended.