The Memory Keeper's Daughter

It's rare that you come across a novel that possesses the almost perfect knit of prose, character development, and plot. Wait a minute, I think they call that 'literature' in the bookstores.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards is, incredibly, a first novel. Edwards is an assistant professor of English at the Unviersity of Kentucky, (i.e in my eyes therefore, highly qualified to write such beautiful sentences -unlike myself). Her descriptive talents rarely result in clichés, she writes with a fluidity and an originality that seems to have taken years and years. (I don't know for sure how long this book was in the making, though). I do know that Edwards is an acclaimed a short-story writer, which might explain the condensing of the story into time periods. She skips fom 1964 to 1989, using key periods such as the Vietnam War, Disability Rights, Women's Lib as backdrops. It comforts me to be reminded that the older you are, the more you know, or have experienced or have observed; the more you have to say.

So The Memory Keeper's Daughter is not perfect. There are some strange parts to the storyline, which raised questions such as, 'what happened to Rosemary and Jack?', and 'Oh, I think I'm supposed to be crying bcause this is probably the most poignant part of the story', 'Someone, please leave me a deed, and a secret bank account with lots of money in it - ah, the convenient fantasy-factor of novels' and 'Man, that's some big secret. 25 years? Surely someone would have blurted it out?'. But the satisfying part of Edwards' writing is that the plot in other, less literary hands could have been extreme-ly (imagine an American male voice-over booming as you read extreme) saccharine and blurgghhh. (The Drowning People by the then 19 year old very good looking Brit, Richard Mason, springs to mind. nb 4 days I'll never get back).

Plot summary? In 1964, a young doctor with a sad and impoverished past helps his wife give birth to twins. The first child is a boy, and completely healthy. The second is a girl. With Down Syndrome. The doctor, thinking that such a child will bring sadness to wife and new family, decides to ask the nurse who assisted at the birth to take the girl to an institution. He tells his wife the daughter was still born. But the nurse keeps the child and raises her in another city. The 'death' of the daughter, this lie, affects the lives of each character. Of course, the plain, lonely, single nurse finds love and a personal cause in the rearing of the handicapped child, the doctor's wife turns to drink and a collection of love affairs, the son grows up a musical genius, although bitter (the old 'in the shadow of his 'dead' sister' syndrome), and the doctor tries to overcompensate for his terrible decision thereby ruining the next 25 years for everyone. It sounds melodramatic, but I honestly must say it didn't feel like it.

Oh, it could have been horrible and yes, I read it within a period of 24 hours, which is quite fast for me (the previous book was read within 72 hours, the one before that .... 3 months!). So maybe I have edited out the 'meh' parts. But it was a page-turner, it was gripping. Did I really care about the characters, did I really believe them? Well, actually no, not really.

The writing lured me most.

So, how does Kim Edwards write?Here are some of the many things that made me smile, or think, I want to make someone else smile when they read something I might write:

Laundry that smells of wind. (Wait a minute, what kind of wind? Hmmm)

Specks of blood are grim hearts, bloody valentines.

A vacuum cleaner is incongruous and odd as a steel-blue pig.

The sound of wasps being sucked up said vacuum cleaner is like acorns bouncing on the roof.

"Phoebe was shoving her hands deep into the velvety lentils now, laughing with the little boy beside her. She lifted fistfuls and let them run through her fingers, and the boy held out a yellow plastic cup to catch them."

Okay, I don't really know why I love these descriptions. But I can smell the laundry, see those hearts and the Electrolux. I can hear those wasps go knock-klok-bok up the hose. I can also hear the hiss of the lentils as they trickle onto a pile and I can see random lentils fly off the little mound and bounce off and around. I like what I read to mildly surprise me. Then I become greedy!

But there are other things. There are the moments when Phoebe grabs the medallion, when you find out more about the technical side of the photos that David took, and the simple fact of Paul's musical talents and Julliard dreams. Sure, it's fiction, and anything can happen. But I also realised the extent of the research gone into this work.

Sure, I can be a bit choppy and change-y when it comes to books and movies. I need time to digest them, and I finished consuming this story only 9 hours ago. Sometimes I realise I have actually detested a film for its flaws and simplicity even though I left the cinema on an adrenalin high. And I've read a few books that have started off brilliantly and then left me wanting. Or their writing style redeems their disappointing content, or vice versa. Works such as Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time-Traveller's Daughter come to mind. Three Dollars, by Elliot Perlman - I loved it on the first reading, I hated it on the second and I gave up on the third. But, a plus for me, I still remember these books and I remember being astonished by what I was reading. The Memory Keeper's Daughter is one of these such creations. Will I read it again? Probably not. Am I glad I read it? Definitely. It has spurred me onto my own literary quest. Because the more I read, the more I want to write. (Note to self: I should listen to even more music).