Story of an unstable mind
By Zoe Slutzky |
July 17, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
UNRELIABLE narrators come in many shapes. There are madmen, mystics, seducers, na?fs - Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, the ghost-prone governess in "The Turn of the Screw" and Poe's self-defeating paranoiac in "The Tell-Tale Heart," for starters. And then there is Dr Jennifer White, who narrates Alice LaPlante's first novel. By the time "Turn of Mind" begins, she is losing her wits to Alzheimer's disease and is the prime suspect in her best friend's murder. She is as unreliable as they come.
Neither of these facts is fully clear to Jennifer, of course. Her illness has forced her to retire from a celebrated career as an orthopedic surgeon, specializing in hands. Amanda O'Toole, her longtime neighbor and confidante, has been found dead in her Chicago brownstone, four of her fingers expertly severed at the joints. Jennifer cannot, or will not, remember whether she killed Amanda. But something nags at her crumbling memory, "something that resides in a sterile, brightly lit place where there is no room for shadows. The place for blood and bone. Yet shadows exist. And secrets."
It is a doozy of a set-up: the telltale digits, the amnesiac at large. The unfocused dread that Jennifer feels will linger to the end. But to call "Turn of Mind" a thriller - or a chronicle of illness, or saga of friendship, for that matter - would confine it to a genre it transcends. This is a portrait of an unstable mind, an expansive, expertly wrought imagining of memory's failures and potential.
Its grounding landmark is the house on the leafy street where Jennifer has lived for decades, three doors down from her murdered friend. We see Jennifer there before the murder; after it, in a purgatory-like assisted-living facility; and during a brief escape, when she roams, barefoot, through a sultry Chicago night. A coda will answer much of the mystery. By then, the telling has shifted to a nameless third-person narrator, Jennifer too far gone to speak. Through it all, Jennifer's house remains a kind of compass - the focal point of past family life, and half of the local universe she shared with Amanda.
A small cast of characters drifts into and out of the narrative. Jennifer's 29-year-old son, Mark, comes by to visit and in clouded moments, she takes him for her late husband; in others she regards him with a stranger's indifference.
Although Amanda never makes a live appearance, she emerges, finally, in clearer relief than anyone else. At times, the slightest trigger sends the past rushing in, and Jennifer remembers days like the one they spent at the beach with their families, the adults eating sandy ham sandwiches and drinking too much wine.
At Amanda's insistence, the conversation goes a step too far, and its revelations will have lasting consequences for Jennifer. These lucid flashbacks reveal the extent of her friend's subtle treachery.
Alzheimer's is bleak territory, and to saddle Jennifer with suspected murder seems cruel and unusual punishment. But in LaPlante's vivid prose, her waning mind proves a prism instead of a prison, her memory refracted to rich, sensual effect. The twists and turns of mind this novel charts are haunting and original.
Neither of these facts is fully clear to Jennifer, of course. Her illness has forced her to retire from a celebrated career as an orthopedic surgeon, specializing in hands. Amanda O'Toole, her longtime neighbor and confidante, has been found dead in her Chicago brownstone, four of her fingers expertly severed at the joints. Jennifer cannot, or will not, remember whether she killed Amanda. But something nags at her crumbling memory, "something that resides in a sterile, brightly lit place where there is no room for shadows. The place for blood and bone. Yet shadows exist. And secrets."
It is a doozy of a set-up: the telltale digits, the amnesiac at large. The unfocused dread that Jennifer feels will linger to the end. But to call "Turn of Mind" a thriller - or a chronicle of illness, or saga of friendship, for that matter - would confine it to a genre it transcends. This is a portrait of an unstable mind, an expansive, expertly wrought imagining of memory's failures and potential.
Its grounding landmark is the house on the leafy street where Jennifer has lived for decades, three doors down from her murdered friend. We see Jennifer there before the murder; after it, in a purgatory-like assisted-living facility; and during a brief escape, when she roams, barefoot, through a sultry Chicago night. A coda will answer much of the mystery. By then, the telling has shifted to a nameless third-person narrator, Jennifer too far gone to speak. Through it all, Jennifer's house remains a kind of compass - the focal point of past family life, and half of the local universe she shared with Amanda.
A small cast of characters drifts into and out of the narrative. Jennifer's 29-year-old son, Mark, comes by to visit and in clouded moments, she takes him for her late husband; in others she regards him with a stranger's indifference.
Although Amanda never makes a live appearance, she emerges, finally, in clearer relief than anyone else. At times, the slightest trigger sends the past rushing in, and Jennifer remembers days like the one they spent at the beach with their families, the adults eating sandy ham sandwiches and drinking too much wine.
At Amanda's insistence, the conversation goes a step too far, and its revelations will have lasting consequences for Jennifer. These lucid flashbacks reveal the extent of her friend's subtle treachery.
Alzheimer's is bleak territory, and to saddle Jennifer with suspected murder seems cruel and unusual punishment. But in LaPlante's vivid prose, her waning mind proves a prism instead of a prison, her memory refracted to rich, sensual effect. The twists and turns of mind this novel charts are haunting and original.
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