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Summary
Summary
By turns funny, charming, and tragic, Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel takes us inside the heart and mind of Dr. Victor Aaron, a leading Alzheimer's researcher at the Soborg Institute on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Victor spends his days alternating between long hours in the sterile lab and running through memories of his late wife, Sara. He has preserved their marriage as a sort of perfect, if tumultuous, duet between two opposite but precisely compatible souls. But one day, in the midst of organizing his already hyperorganized life, Victor discovers a series of index cards covered in Sara's handwriting. They chronicle the major "changes in direction" of their marriage, written as part of a brief fling with couples counseling. Sara's version of their great love story is markedly different from his own, which, for the eminent memory specialist, is a startling revelation. Victor is forced to reevaluate and relive each moment of their marriage, never knowing if the revisions will hurt or hearten. Meanwhile, as Victor's faith in memory itself unravels, so too does his precisely balanced support network, a group of strong women---from his lab assistant to Aunt Betsy, doddering doyenne of the island---that had, so far, allowed him to avoid grieving.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A famed neuroscientist learns potent lessons about the fallibility of memory in Baldwin's underwhelming debut, a highbrow melodrama that stretches for resonance and is narrated by noted Alzheimer's researcher Dr. Victor Aaron, who works at a small but prestigious Maine lab and grieves the death of his screenwriter wife, Sara. Victor finds a series of note cards that recount key moments in their 33-year marriage, but Victor's memories of the same events are either missing or differ, and it becomes clear there were longstanding issues in the marriage-notably that Victor felt threatened by Sara's success and wasn't supportive of her work. Victor does the normal confused and grieving middle-aged man things-becomes fixated on his laments, takes a younger lover-and eventually finds himself hosting his goddaughter, Cornelia, who inadvertently provides the clue that allows Victor to discover Sara's final, unfinished screenplay. Sara's perspective-here limited to her note cards-is affecting and provides the novel its best moments. Unfortunately, readers are stuck for the most part with Victor, whose unsympathetic culpability and fundamental blandness sap narrative energy and make much of the novel feel like filler. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
In this flaccid first novel, a scientist picks through memories of his marriage to a writer.He's no slouch, this Victor Aaron. The 58-year-old geneticist is a top Alzheimer's researcher; after stints at Harvard and NYU, he's now professor at a prestigious institute on Maine's Mount Desert Island. His personal life is a mess since Sara, his wife of 33 years, died in a car accident. Victor has been meeting secretly once a week with Regina, a young postgraduate researcher on campus who writes poetry and enjoys burlesque dancing. Is she just "bereavement therapy"? Maybe so, for the sex has petered out since Victor became impotent, and Sara is always on his mind. When their marriage was going through a rough patch, her therapist had them write about its most important moments; in her index card notes, Sara comes through loud and clear. Professional advancement was important for this childless couple; Sara's path was rockier than Victor's. It was not until she turned 40 that she hit paydirt with a feminist play that became a Broadway smash. Another fallow period ended with her greatest success, a screenplay for a romantic comedy. Not surprisingly, Sara and Victor have different memories of these pivotal moments. Their adultery-free marriage is threatened only once, whenan ill-chosen word of Victor's leads to separate bedrooms and Sara's departure to Los Angeles. The incident confirms the stereotypes of Temperamental Artist and Insensitive Scientist ("Victor listens to neurons, not people"). Baldwin tries to spice up his thinly plotted novel with an array of minor characters (his libertine best friend, his outspoken goddaughter, his gossipy aunt), all of them feistier than the bland Victor.Fails to achieve liftoff.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Months after his wife, Sara, is killed in a car accident, Dr. Victor Aaron is still in the throes of mourning, although he has rather peculiar ways of showing it. By day, Aaron functions as a dedicated lab rat, heading groundbreaking research and trolling for corporate grants. By night, he conducts a sexually intense but ultimately unsatisfying affair with a considerably younger graduate student named Regina, whom he pursues to the point of stalking. Further complicating his recovery are his weekly command-performance dinners with his wife's elderly aunt Betsy and the sudden appearance of his goddaughter, Cornelia, who moves in with him while interning at a local restaurant. Amid the chaos, Aaron spends his insomnia-fueled nights combing through Sara's belongings until the discovery of a series of disturbing notes, in which she chronicled the tumultuous years of their marriage, sends him into further despair. Baldwin's manic debut novel delivers a capricious, poignant, yet oddly perceptive account of the quixotic nature of relationships and the fallacies of memory.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN fiction as in life, you can't save people from themselves. Although that never keeps anyone from trying, as Rosecrans Baldwin's amiable first novel demonstrates. Dr. Victor Aaron is 58 years old, a research scientist specializing in Alzheimer's disease at a small (but well endowed) college on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Almost three years earlier, he lost his wife, Sara, in a car accident. They had no children. Everyone around Victor is concerned about him, and with good reason. His response to Sara's death is not so much stoic as anesthetized. He goes about his routines of healthy breakfast, swimming, work and more work, seeming increasingly numb and remote. As another character puts it, "Your wife had died and everyone knew but you." But Victor's misery and bewilderment are only submerged. He returns again and again to the puzzle of his marriage, which had both its good stretches and sour notes. At the time of Sara's death they were attempting to reconcile after a trial separation. Would it have been successful? What brought them to such a pass in the first place? Was the marriage, either in its entirety or its particular moments, what he had believed it to be? There is a sense in which Victor cannot complete or even begin his mourning until he knows exactly what he lost. Unfortunately for him, verifiable results are hard to find outside the lab. Sara enters the narrative both through Victor's own memories and by means of the journal entries, in the form of index cards, that Victor discovers after her death. These had been written at the suggestion of a marriage counselor who urged each of them to document "five changes of direction" in the marriage. Sara's observations are sharp enough and damning enough that every spouse should consider a similar project, just so his or her side of the story gets told in the event of a premature death. Sara wrote out 54 cards. Victor's only attempt at completing the writing assignment comes after Sara's accident: "My marriage went in a single direction, and then it stopped." Sara was an avant-garde playwright turned screenwriter with one megabit movie that conferred both money and Hollywood celebrity.( For what it's worth, she is also a more graceful narrator than Victor.) She seems to have had more than her share of bad moods, self-doubt, writer's block and fits of temperament. She and Victor were something close to polar opposites. There were missed cues, conflicts and a fair amount of drifting apart. Of course, Victor felt threatened and excluded by Sara's success, while Sara suffered from his apparent lack of interest and remoteness. You really wish these two had given marriage counseling a fair chance. No one should be surprised that memory is often unreliable and subjective. But Victor is surprised, over and over again. The discrepancies between Sara's accounts and his own version of the same events dismay him beyond all measure. It's as if one of his Alzheimer's experiments has turned on him. Victor's obdurate cluelessness regarding basic emotional processes and responses can be exasperating for the reader. He's not a bad guy; he just isn't paying attention. He would seem unbelievable if we didn't all know people who were just as lacking in self-awareness and self-expression. He is the sort of narrator who occasionally moves a reader to sympathy, but just as often makes you want to give him a few good smacks upside the head. Smacks of various sorts are administered by the other characters, certainly by Sara, both before and after her death. More psychic blows come from Sara's 86-year-old Aunt Betsy, who makes the most of the behavioral latitude allowed those who are elderly, wealthy and well liquored. By default, she has become Victor's regular Friday night dinner date. "Be honest dear," she asks, "am I all you've got?" WELL, yes and no. Victor's world is populated by other women who also worry about him and make their different attempts to reach out to him. Lucy, his hypercompetent associate director, has her own reiationship troubles and for some reason believes that Victor will have good advice to offer. Cornelia, the 22-year-old daughter of a childhood friend, comes to spend the summer with "Uncle Victor," her godfather. Only Aunt Betsy is sharp enough to raise an alarm at this prospect. Victor, of course, is oblivious to sexual tension. As for Cornelia, she indulges in such an excess of lap-sitting, leg-draping and hand-holding that one suspects it's just a setup for an inevitable plot complication: "People stared at us," Victor frets, "probably mistaking us for some May-December couple." They might be forgiven. Perhaps the most important of these women is Regina, Victor's sometime lover. She is 25, hardly older than Cornelia, and a graduate fellow in a lab adjacent to Victor's. A young woman who, after an initial social encounter, e-mails an older gentleman to invite him to an evening of costumed burleseque and sexual congress, has her own interesting complexities. (Really, Victor was only hoping for a coffee date!) During these private performances, Regina adopts the persona La Loulou and addresses Victor as "chéri." "So why burlesque? Because it's the personal empowerment revue. It's not about sex, it's about luster, it's about control." As one might suspect, this rationale has its limits. When Regina turns sulky and needy, Victor can't put two sentences together to understand or placate her. Of course Victor must be humbled and undone before he can reconnect. Once this process is under way, "You Lost Me There" hits its stride. Victor's body sends him increasingly urgent S.O.S.'s in the form of insomnia and what we have learned to call erectile dysfunction. Sara's notecards recount a night when Russell, Victor's childhood friend, made a pass at her. Did it really happen? If it did, Victor, who was present, never noticed. Did Russell and Sara later have an affair? Victor's memories of events both large and small are suspect, and by now he doesn't know what to believe or disbelieve. And where is Sara's final, missing screenplay? Victor's breakdown is a gradual affair. One might wish that, for maximum effect, the episode had been subcontracted out to Richard Russo, who has made a minor art form out of wincing physical comedy combined with public humiliation. But Baldwin has a softer landing in mind for Victor, as well as for the novel. Victor takes a forced break from work and learns to tend to his own needs and the needs of those around him. Aunt Betsy's health is in decline. Her estranged son, an addict and an alcoholic fighting relapse, is also on the scene. Victor is able to relax and contemplate, as if for the first time, the splendid coastal scenery. Like a man with a brand-new brain, Victor begins to make connections and assemble a store of cautious wisdom. Neither memories nor marriages are static. As a boy, he'd once watched Russell ride a bike no-hands. Why was Victor scared to do the same? "Was how I thought about things, the way things happened in my mind, the same as how Russell thought about things?" It's taken Victor all his life to come up with the answer: No, and that's all right. Welcome to the world, Dr. Aaron. It's never too late to find your place in it. Jean Thompson's novel "Everybody's Here, Everybody's Gone" will be published next spring.
Library Journal Review
Victor Aaron is a successful Alzheimer's researcher. After the death of Sara, his wife and a one-hit wonder screenwriter, Victor finds a stack of index cards in her handwriting that detail with crude specificity moments of marital despair. And, sadly, he remembers things differently. Enter a midlife crisis during which Victor courts a younger woman (a researcher at his lab), hosts a friend's flexitarian daughter for a tempestuous season of hiking and immaturity, and again befriends Sara's dying aunt, Betsy, whose condition forces Victor to face finality and, in turn, finally mourn his lost wife. VERDICT At its best, this debut captures the irreverence and generous wit evident on the website the Morning News (www.themorningnews.org), of which Baldwin is a founding editor. Unfortunately, the inventive form created by the inclusion of Sara's index cards is soon dropped (they figure prominently in the beginning), and the story becomes a fairly ordinary, if sometimes zany and always appealing, midlife-crisis story. A nice "scientist in a slump" to pair with Ian McEwan's Solar. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/10.]-Stephen Morrow, Ohio Univ., Athens (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
