“What has been lost? Your poor, poor mind. Your life.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUL 6, 2011)

Dr. Jennifer White has early onset Alzheimer’s disease at 64 years old. Once an esteemed orthopedic surgeon specializing in surgery of the hands, she is now unable to remember things from minute to minute, unable to recognize her son Mark or her daughter Fiona most of the time. Her mind goes in and out from fog to lucidity but the lucidity, for the most part, are memories of her early life. In Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, the reader gets deeply into the mind of a woman with dementia. It is very realistic and fascinating. Having a mother with dementia and being a clinical social worker myself, I can say without reservation that Alice LaPlante really gets it.

The novel is primarily about Jennifer’s life, before and after the onset of her dementia. We go backwards with her as she remembers her marriage, her family of origin, her childbirths and her education. Complicating matters is the fact that Amanda, her best friend, has been murdered and four digits of Amanda’s hand have been removed. Jennifer has gone from being a “person of interest”  to becoming a primary suspect. The question remains, however, whether she did it and why would she do such a thing. The digits were removed in a professional manner, in the way an orthopedist might do such a thing.

We go back with Jennifer to her relationship with Amanda. Both are very strong women. Amanda is one tough cookie, honest to the point of disregarding feelings and willing to betray a friend’s confidence if she does not agree with their ethics. At one point Jennifer calls Amanda both “the inflictor and healer of my pain. Both.” Jennifer has narcissistic tendencies, sees herself as better than others, more deserving. “People who take this to an extreme are called sociopaths, Amanda tells me. You have certain tendencies. You should watch them.”

Mark and Fiona are both portrayed as loving their mother but not being entirely honest in their interactions with her. Mark describes himself as “Tall, dark, handsome twenty-nine-year-old lawyer, with a bit of a substance abuse problem, looking for love and money in what are apparently all the wrong places.”  One of the places he goes to for money is to Jennifer. Fiona, however, is Jennifer’s financial executor and she and Mark are estranged. The family dynamics play out very interestingly.

As the novel starts, Jennifer is living at home with a caretaker. She calls her disease “a death sentence. The death of the mind. I’ve already given notice at the hospital, announced my retirement. I have started keeping a journal so I have some continuity in my life. But I won’t be able to live on my own for very much longer.” After she begins to degenerate drastically, Mark and Fiona put her in an assisted care facility where she is often restrained because of her drastic changes of mood and aggression. She has reached a point where she is not cognizant of her visitors’ names, even people she’s known all her life. When things get hardest for her, she takes herself to a zone in the past where she guides herself through imagery and memories.

The detective on the case frequently visits Jennifer, hoping to find her lucid enough to remember something, anything about Amanda’s death. Her children want Jennifer to be left alone but the detective is tenacious. If Jennifer is convicted of this crime, even though she is incompetent mentally, she will have to be moved to a state facility. There is a lot at stake here.

Alice LaPlante writes like a pro. I’d never guess this is a debut novel. It reads fluidly and builds up cadence and tension. I hated to put it down and, thankfully, was able to finish it in two days. I look forward to LaPlante’s books down the road. She has a great gift.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 210 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alice LaPlante
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Circle of Wives The Making of a Story

Bibliography:

• Turn of Mind (2011)
• A Circle of Wives (March 2014)

Other:

• The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing (2007)
• Method and Madness: The Making of a Story: A Guide to Writing Fiction (2008)

“A man is anxious because he has lost too much time and has ended up thinking about all he should have thought about when he had the time.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUL 18, 2010)

This book unsettled me. Its rendering of a mind descending (drifting? decaying?) into an Alzheimerian abyss is frightening in its deft, almost poetic, description. Indeed, it is disarming in its expanding degrees of what is normal to what is irrevocably and silently lost. If you worry about Alzheimer’s–and who cannot but worry–or have experienced it in your family, the tale told in The Wilderness, the story of Lincolnshire (England) architect Jake Jameson, will stun you. Simply and frighteningly stun you.

Do not be put-off by my comments. This is not a horror show. Rather this the tracing of a gentle clear mountain stream as it winds and falls its way to complete and utter otherness, the wilderness of the ocean where the river is lost forever. This is a meditation on memory and what they–indeed, we ourselves–consist of. If we are the accumulation of experience stored as shards called memories, what do we become as those shards are lost? It is the opposing Proustian, equally philosophical, question. In this instance Jake’s memories move and resist pattern and ultimately are never the same twice. He cannot escape the flow, for this is his world, what he has in fact become. For example, his daughter Alice. She has come to town to visit him with her boyfriend, the poet. At least he thinks it is Alice. He remembers her childhood and how he and his wife struggled to conceive her and one thought leads to another, tumbling. Alice tells him she is pregnant. And then, later, while looking through a photo album with a man he thinks he should know (the reader is not sure either), Jake sees a photo: “In this one there is a child in a white bed, and he recognizes the open, empty features on their way somewhere, but perhaps lost….and he wants to take the series of tubes and machines from the bed so that she can be comfortable.” We learn from an observer: “Oh, dear Alice,” the woman says. ‘She had been in hospital for such a long time, look how tiny she is.” And finally: “This was just a few days before she died.” So who was the pregnant woman who visited him? Or was that just a jumbled memory? Who did that memory belong to? Similarly, their is the fate of his wife, Helen. Did she have a stroke or fall from a ladder? Further, there is a recurring gunshot through the novel, the piercing crack of a round being fired. Was someone shot? Wounded or killed? But it never resolves, like a memory that cannot be pinned down. These threads interweave and the reader cannot see the tapestry from which they are unraveling. Nor can Jake. We are in his world.

There is a masterly technical aspect to this book which unsettles the reader. At times one becomes, like Jake, lost in “the wilderness” that is Jake’s mind. The text becomes the disorienting individual experience. Memories come and go like a breeze through a empty house, from everywhere and from nowhere in particular. You experience this one and then another washes over you. It is a device that puts the reader on the same unsteady footing as the protagonist. My wife read this book before I did. When I finished we compared notes. It was remarkable how we each experienced the book in a different fashion. She held to some narrative, like a snippet of memory, and I dismissed the same snippet to hold another in its place. For instance, there is a woman in the novel, Joy, the daughter of a family friend. We cannot trust Jake’s recollection of what did or did not happen between he and Joy. While I was convinced of one rendering, my wife subscribed to another. And both were correct. Or both wrong. There was no definitive conclusion. If this were music it would suggest two–or more–contrapuntal melodies interweaving but never resolving. Instead the listener is left not knowing, struggling with emptiness. “One must always fight back, not in the hope of winning but just to delay the moment of losing,” thinks Jake, battling the ensuing emptiness. It is a struggle we participate in.

Early on in the novel Jake, going to his retirement celebration, pulls off the road. He “lifts his glasses, and rubes his eyes. He has been doing this journey to and from work every day for thirty-five years. He pores over the map.” We all know the feeling of forgetting for a moment that very thing we think is most secure in our memory. Nothing to worry about, we console ourselves. But like rocks being laid, the weight grows steadily, but grows nonetheless. A few pages later, “he failed to notice…the confusion, the clotting of thoughts, disorientation….” And so the rocks are laid one atop the other, until ever so naturally, a few hundred pages later, Jake is sitting with people he does not know, but thinks he should, looking at a photo album filled with images of people he does not recognize. And then the last sentence: “He grips the hand that has found his, opens his eyes, and walks on.” How did this happen? you ask. How did he get to that place. But you know, because you, the reader, walked along with him from quiet forgetfulness to disorientation, loss of memory, confusion and finally, heartbreakingly, blind resignation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; 1 edition (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Samantha Harvey
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Alzheimer victim: Lost by Alice Lichtenstein

Bibliography:

• The Wilderness (February 2009)

“I see that I’m going down,” Susan said. “Christopher and I are going down. No hope. Only we can go down with fear and anger, or we can go down with love. I want to go down with love. But I don’t know how.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (MAR 10, 2010)

Lost, by Alice Lichtenstein, is a beautiful, literary and profoundly poetic novel. It will appeal to anyone who has ever known or loved a person with Alzheimer’s or has lost someone they loved. The descriptions of loss and grief are profound and the book keeps on getting better with each page.

The novel is told from the viewpoint of three people, each with a different story, whose lives become interconnected. The chapters are in the voices of different characters – Corey, Jeff, and Susan.

Corey is an eleven-year-old boy who has been legally acquitted of setting a fire that destroyed his home and killed his older brother. Corey is fascinated with fires and during a game that he played with his brother, using cigarette lighters, his house burned down. It is difficult to find a placement for Corey in the foster system because of his history of fire starting. Currently, he is living with his grandparents but they are on the verge of kicking him out. Corey’s grandmother can’t sleep with Corey in the house because she is afraid of him. Corey has been mute since the fire and can not explain himself to others.

Susan, 62 years old, is living with her husband of four decades, Christopher. Christopher is 72 years old and has rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s disease. One morning, Susan goes for a short walk and when she returns, Christopher is gone, lost. She searches for him unsuccessfully so calls in the search and rescue team.

Jeff Herdman, 40 years old, is the liaison between Susan and the searchers. He is a trained EMT who had served in Vietnam. Despite having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, he functions well. He is helpful to Susan and encourages her to be hopeful. He is in the midst of his own marital crisis. His wife, Leeanne, 20 years his junior has left him for a younger man. During the day Jeff works as a caseworker for disturbed teenagers, primarily fire starters such as Corey, who is one of his clients.

The novel describes the pre-Alzheimer’s relationship of Susan and Christopher. Their love is a deep one that has survived Christopher’s disease. Susan cares for him gently and lovingly despite knowing that the Christopher she’s loved is long gone. The book shows us the many ways that these two people have lived and loved for decades. Their strength is in the commitment and nourishment of one another. Both of them suffer profound grief at their losses. Susan worked as a microbiologist, specializing in newts and salamanders. Interestingly, they have regenerative brains which Susan wishes she could find a way to replicate in humans. Christopher worked as an architect. As his Alzheimer’s worsened, Susan moved to another town because she felt shunned by their old friends who no longer came around or invited them out. Being around Christopher was too difficult for them.

Jeff’s marriage to Leeanne is in a shambles. Leeanne is childlike in her emotional immaturity and is currently having an affair for which she apparently feels no guilt. During the search and rescue for Christopher, Leeanne has a DUI and is jailed. It is obvious that she intends to leave Jeff.

Corey stumbles across Christopher lying dead in the woods but is too frightened to report this. He is fearful that he will be blamed for this death, too. When his grandparents tell him he is going to be kicked out of their home, he runs away, yet another victim for the search and rescue team.

Susan suspects from the beginning that Christopher is dead. As Jeff says to her, “In the rescue business there is rescue and there is recovery, which is ironic, Jeff thinks, because it’s the recovery no one ever really recovers from.” The book allows us to see inside the current and past histories of Jeff, Susan and Corey. We are privy to their rich emotional lives. By the time the book is finished, their relationships to one another have evolved and become much deeper and intense.

This is a book to read slowly, cherishing the beauty of the language. Lichtenstein writes with the soul of a poet. Her language is expressive, elegiac, and sensitive. We get to know the depth of the characters and are one with them, sharing their pain, hopes, and memories. The poignancy of the love and loss is beautifully described. With each page, the reader becomes more involved with the characters. By the end of the book, we are one with them.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (March 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE:	Lost
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alice Lichtenstein
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another author that deals with the themes in this book: Moral Hazards by Kate Jennings

Bibliography:

• The Genius of the World (2000)
• Lost (March 2010)