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.