Stefan Merrill Block
Faber, £14.99IN THE midst of his improbably upbeat debut novel, Stefan Merrill Block tells the story of Lord Alban Mapplethorpe and his descendants. The Mapplethorpes came from Iddylwahl, England, a place
that Merrill says is "now long since wiped from map and memory alike". Lord Mapplethorpe was an exceptional man, not only for his many affairs but also for his inability to be secretive about them. "Precisely what is it that we must act as if never happened?" he would ask his lady friends.
Nearly 100 of Iddylwahl's women became involved with this amnesiac, Georgian-era duke. Sixty of them carried his offspring. And 38 carried the genetic mutation that originated in him and would go on to shape the 20th-century lives of Block's main characters. That mutation, which the author calls EOA-23, "sealed itself into the genome of the duke (and all of those to follow)…"
As that fictitious subplot illustrates, Block has found an unusually roundabout, fanciful way of telling the story of one family's genetic destiny. And The Story of Forgetting does not confine its eccentricity to the distant past. Nothing about Block's narrative is predictable or even suitably bleak, given the nature of the illness he addresses. Early-onset Alzheimer's disease, made grimmer by the new scientific certitude of genetic testing, is at the heart of this emotional rollercoaster of a novel.
Block establishes his idiosyncrasies by following an indirect path to the heart of his story. His book's most enchanting detour is to a parallel universe called Isidora, which provides the kind of solace once found on Kurt Vonnegut's Planet Tralfamadore. Isidora is a place where memory doesn't matter and therefore anything is possible: people can fall in love over and over without realising they have done it before. And Isidora provides escape from the painful realities that sear The Story Of Forgetting.
In a book that repeatedly and variously contemplates the subject of memory, Block begins by describing a strange love affair. An old man named Abel recalls how wildly and unreasonably he once loved Mae, even though she was his brother's wife. Abel loved everything about her and they lived blissfully and guiltily in a remote Texas farmhouse until Paul, Abel's brother, returned from the military. Block gives Paul an ever-diminishing mental capacity. Paul does not even wonder, when Mae becomes pregnant, which of the two men is the father of her child.
The Story Of Forgetting then takes up a second plotline. This part of the book is narrated by a teenager named Seth, who comes from another troubled family. "As I grew up, my mom grew down," he says. Even without the certitude provided by Block's biography, it's clear from this deeply felt novel that he knows first hand what it means to witness this kind of decline in loved ones.
Seth has a mother who scares and saddens him. "I feel like I've known you my whole life," she tells her son. She also maintains that her life started on the day he was born, thus keeping Seth ignorant about his full family history. Then she reaches a crisis point and has to be institutionalised at a place that Seth calls the Waiting Room.
Seth and Abel's separate parts of The Story Of Forgetting are interwoven with fairytale glimpses of Isidora. This structure is both cryptic and oddly suspenseful, since the book successfully obscures the way in which its pieces ultimately connect. At the same time, in seemingly whatever ways strike his fancy, Block considers how forgetting can be an act of will as well as a medical condition. Eventually, in a novel that has a strong scientific component, Seth begins conducting research into the EOA-23 gene.
He wants to understand not only what has happened to his mother but also how long a shadow her fate casts. He wants to know why, if his parents thought he was doomed to Alzheimer's, they ever wanted Seth to be born. Yet The Story Of Forgetting is as true to the anguish of these questions as it is ablaze with love and vitality. In the end, without false optimism, Block taps into the life force that gives Seth a human, heart-wrenching answer.
The full article contains 720 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
