Published
2011
“I
am having trouble concentrating. I try
to do what a new sign in the kitchen commands me: Live in the moment. I have to.
There is no other way for me, not anymore.”
These
are words passing through the mind of Dr. Jenny White, a surgeon specialized in
the care and healing of human hands, who in her early sixties has been out of
practice for many years due to Alzheimer’s.
Her dementia is so far developed that she becomes displaced in time very
easily. People in her life who have died
are sometimes still alive for her. She
forgets the names of her grown children.
There are gaps between the last thing she remembers doing and the
present moment. What has transpired in
the meantime is a blank page in her memory.
Anyone who has had any acquaintance with the disease or friends or
relatives who have been afflicted with it would find these kinds of things ever
so familiar. But two factors make
Jenny’s story quite unusual. One is the
fact that Amanda, a close long time friend and neighbor of hers, has been
murdered, a blow to the head delivered from behind, and Jenny is a suspect in
the police investigation, since four fingers of one of the woman’s hands have
been surgically removed, something Jenny would be professionally skilled at
doing.
The
other curious thing about her story is the manner in which it is told by this
first time novelist, Alice LaPlante. The
entire 455-pages (in hardback) relate Jenny’s narrative from her point of
view. All of it! The reader sees and hears only what she sees
and hears. We know only what she knows
at any point. We never shift over into
the mind of anyone else. Events and
conversations all unfold in her presence.
There are no narrating voices, no overriding commentary. We only know that someone is addressing her
or making comment to her when she hears them speak or when they write in her
journal telling of incidents and memories that she would not otherwise
remember. Jenny tells her story in
present time as she experiences it. The
entire book is her internal monologue responding to what is said to her or to
what happens around her or to what is done to her. She is in every scene. We have to piece the story together from the
fragments. The writing, therefore, is
appropriately terse, economical, sporadic – even somewhat fitful.
And
brilliant! A most fascinating personal
saga that achieves the seemingly impossible!
It works!
Jenny,
a widow, has a twenty-four-year old daughter, Fiona, to whom the afflicted
mother has entrusted the power of attorney and the complete responsibility for
her finances. Fiona shares the ownership
of the house and the decision-making regarding it with her twenty-nine-year-old
brother Mark, who lives out of town. The
two of them have hired a live-in caretaker named Magdalena. And all of them have known Amanda intimately
and are somewhat traumatized by her death and embarrassed by the police
investigation of her murder that implicates Jenny.
Please
do not let me leave the impression that we only get glimpses of these
characters; the fact of the matter is they slowly but definitely take shape and
reveal themselves in the fragments.
Complete, fleshed-out images of them emerge from the trolling we do in
the waters of Jenny’s mind. By the time
one finishes the book, one will be well acquainted with the attributes, good
and undesirable, of all the people who have played a part in Jenny’s life.
Family
friction is not in scarce supply. Mark
is a young man riding a wave of poor investments and threatened bankruptcy,
scheming to get his hands on a sizeable portion of his mother’s money and
pushing to get Jenny to transfer power of attorney over to him. Fiona, though academically successful, is not
the most emotionally stable of people.
She has trouble coping with her mother’s outbursts. Amanda, who we get to know rather thoroughly
in references to the past, is a very shifty individual. Jenny’s relationship with her has been
love/hate to a considerable degree, though little of the embattlements remain
vivid in her failing memory. Magdalena
is quite thorough and efficient at her caretaker job for the most part, but
there is something shady about her that comes to light late in the game. She also has a habit of not noticing when
Jenny has wandered off. A few of these
wanderings lead the woman into gravely dangerous circumstances, which we also
encounter strictly through her perceptions of them.
It
is intriguing that we do not always know how much one of these individuals
knows about the others, since the viewpoint is consistently that of Jenny herself. We are locked into her fluctuating
consciousness. To speak in movie
terminology, we never see anything that happens off screen, unless it is
precisely recounted in Jenny’s presence or written in her journal by someone
else. And Jenny has secrets even from
herself. She knows that her deceased
husband James was a loose cannon and faithless, but she has elaborate devices
for rationalizing the fragility of the marriage and tends to romanticize what
went down between them. Her most
undesirable trait is her paranoia that makes her an unjust accuser of those
trying to help her. For instance, she
attacks Fiona for meddling in her finances when her back is turned, forgetting
that months before she has signed over all money matters to her.
Actually
very little space in the book is taken up with the police investigation. In the truest sense of the word this is not a
thriller or a purposeful murder mystery.
We always know that this investigation is going on and that Jenny is
only faintly aware of it. It is like a
sword that hangs over her head, but she cannot get it into that head that
Amanda is dead, even from natural causes, let alone the violent nature of the
death. She has a lawyer who sits in on
all the interrogation and protects her rights under the law. It is not until surgical instruments used on
Amanda’s hands are found in Jenny’s possession that she is formerly
charged. The barrier for the courts,
however, is her mental unfitness to stand trial and what to do with her when
found guilty of the crime. There is, of
course, a secret attached to the friend’s death that is not disclosed until the
final section of the novel. By that time
Jenny is so mentally out of focus that she cannot comprehend what is going on,
even when it is spelled out for her. But
the reader learns the full details, which put everything that has preceded into
a different light. The ending is tragic,
but not in the manner one might suppose.
For Jenny ignorance and dullness of mind really do become a kind of bliss. The tragedy actually engulfs someone else,
someone who is painfully knowledgeable about Amanda’s demise.
The
mercy of God is not in so many words ever mentioned by any of the characters,
but we can feel it oozing out of the pores of the book. Compassion takes unusual forms, but it does
unfold, not just for the main character but for those who have to suffer the
agonies of care-giving someone with this disease. That Jenny is not able to comprehend the
straits to which she is ultimately confined makes her case far less
heartbreaking than it might have been.
LaPlante in her choice of material celebrates the woman’s keen
imagination, however meandering or fanciful.
Jenny White’s ability to frame her random memories into a shape that is
comforting to her is in a strange way comforting to us.
The
reading of “Turn of Mind” was a real adventure for me. I recommend it for adults who can appreciate
the innovation. I would advise, however,
that you read it right through. If you
try to spread it out over weeks and weeks, taking long absences from the text,
you will probably have a difficult time getting relocated when you choose to
take it up again. Considering all that
is depicted out of sequence, its coherence will be easier to discern if you
stay right with it.
To read other entries in my
blog, please consult its website:
enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn
about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.
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