The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel
by Kim Edwards
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Book Reviews of The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel
Book Review: Politically Correct Weepie
Summary: 1 Stars
You can always tell a Politically Correct novel because the characters who don't behave in a PC way are punished. In this case, when the Misguided Father rejects his Down Syndrome (continually and incorrectly called "Down's Syndrome") daughter, you just know he is going to come to a Bad End. And he does, after 400 pages that move at the pace of a somnolent Galapagos tortoise.
Moving away from the hobbling confines of the premise, and judging the novel just as a novel, it is lacking in many ways.
1. The characters are not well defined and are almost impossible to identify with, except for Caroline Gill, the nurse. At least you know what she is thinking, why she feels that way, and what motivates her. Her reactions, too, are those of a normal person. The others are just vehicles for the author to float her PC plot upon. The father makes little sense, the wife Norah is a cipher, their son Paul just a name with a few attributes hung onto it ("plays the guitar wonderfully".)
They were basically unlikable, spoiled people so I didn't care if they came to a Bad End. They seemed to have no real purpose in life---stereotypical yuppies who never grew up.
2. I see much praise of the author's style but I found it flat and bland. Sometimes style can make up for feeble plot or character but not here. The writing was not vivid and tended to fall back on cliches, like a town in France where you walked to the market for fresh bread and pots of flowers. Surely she could find a more original thing to say about France, other than an image from a travel poster. (All that was missing was the bicycle-basket and the beret.) Opening the book at random, here's a couple of sentences: "The water between his feet was brown, edged with a sickly white foam. The wind rose, and the swirling water flashed, drew closer, and then there was acid in his throat and he was on his hands and knees, the stones cold beneath his hands, vomiting into the wild gray river, heaving until nothing more could be expelled."
Not that there is anything incorrect about them, but for a book lauded for its style, it seems that "brown...sickly white foam...swirling water...wild gray river" are pretty blah descriptives. 400 pages of this gets increasingly dull. I found I had to skim a lot of it just to keep going to the end.
3. The plot involved too many unbelievable things. I know, "suspension of disbelief" and "it's a novel," but I also know that one of the rules of fiction is that your readers will grant you one big thing (say, that Martians have moved to Youngstown, Ohio) but that you must be scrupulous in all the others. In this case, it was one unlikely event after another. I am sure the author set the beginning in 1964 because presumably it was easier for a doctor to cover up his tracks if he did anything questionable back then. And the snowstorm was so patently a set up (how else could the author make sure the usual witnesses couldn't make it in to the hospital?) and the friendly truck driver who turns up just at the right moment o rescue the nurse and the baby...and on and on. I know death certificates existed in 1964 but as that would have ruined her plot, the author didn't mention that little inconvenience.
Book Review: A dysfunctional family.
Summary: 5 Stars
I enjoyed this book. The writer did a grea job describing the cities of Lexington and Pittsburgh and the countryside in the areas the book was taking place. The book is beautifully written.
It was hard to really like David Henry. He was a doctor who did much for the community and those needing medical help but who couldn't afford it. He had free clinics and spent much time working in them. But he treated his family shabbily driving his wife and son away and giving his daughter to whoever would have her.
He had contempt for his son's love of music and wanting to be a musician his life's career. Get a real job he told his son. His son always felt his father disliked him and had contempt for him.
His lonely wife wanted more children,he didn't. Paul was to be an only child. Norah went into the travel agency business. Her first affair was with a wife cheating tourist. Then she travelled with her clients and had many affairs. David never seemed to care. He had become very involved with photography. Paul was embarrased by both parents.
Phoebe, Paul's Downe syndrome twin was adopted by Caroline who was David's nurse who had loved him and not wanting to put Phoebe into a home for the feeble mineded. She felt Phoebe deserved more and ran off to Pittsburgh taking the baby and raising her as her own. She married Al, a good men, who became a father to Phoebe. When David, who became engrossed in his photography, before it was medicine, had a show in Pittsburgh, she wanted to see the show and the person David had become. She went to the show, spoke to David, then realized him for a cold selfish person who cared only for himself. David, wanted to see her again but she had left the photography show. He wondered why he had not married Caroline instead of Norah. He felt her goodness but she had walked away. She was gone, then he realized how much he loved her.
David married Norah because he thought she came from a higher up family. Caroline was the child of older parents and came from a family not much better than the poverty stricken hill billy family he had come from and which he had moved away from never to return.
But back in the 60s it was common to leave a retarded child forgotten in a school for the feeble minded. He felt Norah would be overworked taking care of a Downs syndrome child plus Paul would be embarrassed by having a retarded sister.
After David dies Caroline visits Norah and tells her that the daughter she thought dead and mourned for so many years was alive and living in Pittsburgh. Norah wants to see her and tells Paul his sister is alive. Both go to see her and accept her. Phoebe dosen't quite accept them. She tells them Caroline and Al are her real parents.
Of that family Phoebe is the happiest accepting herself as she is. She has a boy friend, a job and tells everyong she is getting married. Norah finally meets a man she loves and who loves her and gets married. Paul loves a young woman who doesn't love him and leaves him bereft.
Book Review: Very weak.
Summary: 2 Stars
This book reads like it was written by the sort of person who reads this kind of book. It is written at a 9th grade reading level. It is a weak echo of its genre. The drama is ankle deep and stretched thinly around implausible situations. (Situations that, if handled by another writer or another writer's style, may have been interesting, believable, engrossing -- but within this piece of work, felt ridiculous.)
The book repeats itself in several ways. For example, the phrase "starfish hands" and "hands like starfish" appears half a dozen times -- deliberate symbolism? Not as far as my rhetorical analysis could support. Clumsy editing? Sure felt like it.
Then the book repeats itself in larger sweeps. I was ready at any time to have this repeating become some sort of "layer" of the book, one of those between-the-lines build-ups a good novel can tease into existence for the reader's later epiphany. But instead I felt like what I was reading was a little bit broken or badly edited; that the author's intentions were either cloudy... or that this repeating was not intentional, but instead awkward.
The pacing is awkward in this book: prepare for whiplash. Someone in the production of this book organized it into years, thank god, so there is a sequence... but the book is more cinematic than literary, the camera leaping across time and country without any cushion of words (narrative) to help the reader feel carried (or even swept along).
Situations in this book, like so many books in this genre, are created by human beings behaving in ways that are curious and hard to understand. The reader is left with no guidance from the author as to motivation or timing (I get the feeling you are to "slowly come to understand" why characters do the things they do, but that moment never arrives). Even "little" circumstances feel manipulated by the author in ways that chaff suspiciously on the edges: for example, what successful rig driver "forgets" his jumper cables? (We could have been made to feel he is fallible, etc, but instead my eyebrows went straight up. Did the editor spot this hole and she pasted in a sentence in the middle of the action to "cover" it?)
The last thing I want to say is that drama built around realistic characters doing monstrous things must be done BRILLIANTLY in order to really work. The fact is, the monstrous things in this book feel just ridiculous, and they are performed by characters that are trying to be too many things at once. (Not to the point of being 'real people' but to the point of being shelving units crammed with too many of the author's ideas.)
In another author's hands (or another editor's?) I might have been engrossed, disbelieving and yet believing, shocked and curious, etc. Instead, I felt like I was watching a low budget made-for-T.V. movie, where the real meat of the character and story development was somewhere on the cutting-room floor.
I can not recommend this book.
Book Review: A hard story to tell
Summary: 4 Stars
My own sister died of Down Syndrome before I was born, and I remember my Mom telling me that her doctors (in 1951) had told her to send the baby to an institution and forget she had ever been born. Instead my 19-year-old mother, whose husband was out to sea in the Coast Guard, took her baby home and cared for her for 4 months until the baby died of heart problems.
So I knew I had to read this story.
But I didn't find the novel believable. I know how my mother reacted to the loss of her infant, who died only 10 months before I was born. I was in a situation not unlike that of Paul. While I know my mother grieved, I don't believe it colored her whole life to the extent that we are asked to believe in this story. Of course, she knew what had happened, and her husband was not holding a terrible secret. I certainly never missed my sister (though her death probably did make my mother a bit over-protective of me, the replacement child.)
Beyond that, while the writing was lovely in places, the narrative structure of this story must have been difficult to work with. Essentially, the main character, Phoebe, is absent from most of the story. And we move from character to character, Norah, David, Paul (the original family) and then Caroline and Al, the "adoptive" family, yet even here, Phoebe hardly emerges as a real character. When she finally comes into her own at the end, the story moves a little more smoothly.
Also some of the plotting is hard to accept. Is it possible to have a funeral for a child without anyone noticing that there's no actual body to bury? Is it that easy for a single mother with a retarded child to find a job as a live-in caregiver, and to end up being given a house? Did anyone ever ask to see Phoebe's birth certificate? Is it really that easy to just walk off with a child and become her parent?
In addition, throughout much of the story, the dramatic tension involves wondering how the secret will finally be revealed. But at the same time, we understand that David can't tell Norah, because their daughter has in effect been adopted, and it would be horribly cruel to take her away from Caroline, who is now her mother. It also felt wrong to me that David (the father) dies off-stage and before the secret has been revealed. But then, the secret was shared by two people (David, the father and Caroline, the nurse who kept the child), and which one of them has the right to reveal it?
The interlude with Rosemary (a single mother whom David befriends) seemed equally odd and hard to accept.
It is not easy to stretch a plot out over 25 years and two separate families who are mostly unaware of each other's existence. Kim Edwards managed to do that, but just barely. While the opening scenes pulled me in, like many other reviewers, I found that the decades that followed dragged on, and I was just waiting for it to finally be time for the secret to come out.
Book Review: Excellent Story
Summary: 5 Stars
As the snow piles up outside, Dr. David Henry is in a clinic, delivering his wife's first child. She unexpectedly has twins, a boy and a girl. While the boy, Paul, is healthy, the girl, Phoebe, has Down's syndrome. David, who personally knows the pain that a sick child can cause, abruptly decides to send Phoebe to an institution. Believing that he is making the right decision, he tells his wife, Norah, that she died in birth. The nurse, Caroline Gill, is commissioned to bring Phoebe to the institution, but she can't bear to. Instead, she raises Phoebe herself. Memory Keeper's Daughter is told from the points of view of David, Norah, Paul, and Caroline, as the lives of two separate but linked families unfold.
A compelling realistic fiction story, Memory Keeper's Daughter follows the lives of both families as Phoebe and Paul grow up. The two families could not be any more different. The Henry house is full of tension and separation. David, Norah, and Paul become disconnected, as David is swallowed by guilt, Norah mourns Phoebe, and Paul plays guitar to the point of isolation. Caroline, on the other hand, marries a kind truck driver named Al, and they raise Phoebe in a home full of laughter. Watching these two families grow up so differently brings up many questions. What would have happened if David had made a different choice? Where would Caroline be? What would happen to Phoebe, and Norah, and Paul? How would their lives be different?
In the second when David hands Phoebe to Caroline, the rest of his life changes dramatically. He can not go back and change the past, and he can't erase what he has done. He has to live with his decision, and the effects of it. They ripple throughout his life, changing his family forever. As the book puts it, "He had given their daughter away. This secret stood in the middle of their family; it shaped their lives together. He knew it, he saw it, visible to him as a rock wall grown up between them." This "rock wall" changes the dynamics of the family; whenever Norah or Paul tries to connect with David, the tension of the secret gets in the way. Thus, although they live in the same house, they are strangers to one another.
Caroline, however, has a loving home. Phoebe is sweet, caring, and innocent, and Al is funny and kind. Most importantly, their home isn't divided by a "rock wall"; instead, they're comfortable with each other. For Caroline, David's decision had had positive effects on her family: she inherited Phoebe, her beloved daughter, and she met her husband.
Kim Edwards weaves a believable and memorable tale about the effects of a single decision in the lives of two families. By the end of the book, Paul, Norah, and David felt like actual, three-dimensional humans. Their motivations were realistic, and their personalities well rounded. Memory Keeper's Daughter is an amazing story that reflects the enormous power of a single decision.