Here’s what not to read

Published 6:31 pm Monday, November 24, 2008

Every once in awhile I read a book I really hate. This becomes awkward when the book is one chosen by someone in my book group. Or sits atop the New York Times best seller list for 17 weeks. Or is praised by people whose judgment I tend to trust.

Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is such a book. I just completely, totally, hated it.

Before I launch into my invective, I will warn you that I’ll be giving away some plot points, so if you don’t want to know, just stop reading here.

I will concede that the premise of the book has potential. On a snowy night in 1964, a young doctor delivers his own twins. The boy, Paul, is fine; the girl, Phoebe, has Down’s syndrome, and the doctor makes the decision to send the child away, and to tell his wife (conveniently unconscious during the delivery) that the baby was born dead.

So, right there you’ve got trouble in paradise: guilty husband; clueless wife, whose misplaced grieving becomes epic. I don’t pretend that the (supposed) death of a baby isn’t heartbreaking and doesn’t inform one’s life from that point forward. But really, these characters are made to wallow in this tragedy. And the poor reader feels like she’s being hit over the head, again and again, for hundreds of pages, with the same message. As I dragged my way through the deterioration of David and Norah Henry’s marriage, repeatedly reminded by the author of the reason why, I just wanted to scream, “OK! I GET IT!!”

Add to this Edwards’ overblown, melodramatic prose that at times deteriorates into just poor English, and you’ve got a genuinely bad book. Here’s a passage for you, in which Norah Henry realizes her husband is leaving her: “She wept for this knowledge, and for Paul, the rage and lostness in his eyes. For her daughter, never known.” Excuse me, lostness?

Edwards is equally unskilled when it comes to the kind of details that make for a plausible story and plot. When David Henry hands over his newborn daughter to his nurse Caroline Gill, he tells her to take her to an institution. Gill can’t do it. Instead, she keeps the baby and raises her. She and Henry keep in sporadic touch, with him sending money and her sending pictures of Phoebe. But when Gill disappears for a few years, Henry is distraught. Ever think of hiring a private detective? This is the 1970s, not the Middle Ages.

And how about when David Henry dies suddenly, in 1988? Paul is 24, a musician, and close to both his parents. He’s traveling in Europe, performing, when his father dies. His mother doesn’t try to track him down. She doesn’t seem to have an itinerary, doesn’t try to locate him through the American Embassy, doesn’t hire a detective. She just goes ahead and has a funeral for several hundred people, and then tells Paul about it the next time she sees him, a week after the fact, at a pre-arranged meeting outside the Louvre, in Paris. Huh?

Or, check this out. After years of moping around, David Henry (not yet dead — I’m skipping around a bit here) has a kind of midlife crisis and returns to his hillbilly roots, somewhere deep in a holler in West Virginia. He walks through the woods to his family home (of course abandoned), and lo and behold, finds there a young girl. Guess what? She’s the age of his lost daughter. And, she’s pregnant! Wow, talk about life coming full circle.

This bad a book just makes me mean and cynical, so I’ll stop here. But I won’t leave you with nothing good to read. I really enjoyed two novels that have recently come out in paperback: Peter Pouncey’s Rules for Old Men Waiting; and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, recent winner of the Booker Prize. Each of these books is infinitely better and more worth your time than The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

Breck Longstreth can be reached at breckonbooks@yahoo.com.