Review by New York Times Review
JOYCE CAROL OATES'S latest novel makes for uncomfortable reading. Even before the narrative begins, a hint of disquiet creeps in with the epigraph: "The annihilation is not the terror. The journey is the terror." Forget the explicit reference to terror; a clammier sort of eeriness settles on the reader who pauses to research the identity of the epigraph's supposed source, Elihu Hoopes, who turns out to be the "man without a shadow" of the title. To enter these pages is to enter a world of smoke and mirrors, rendered all the more insidious by the realization that this purports to be a world of objective truth, a world of scientific inquiry. A peculiar stylistic device adds to the book's penumbral chill: the omniscient narrator's penchant for isolating words within a sentence, whether quarantining them inside quotation marks, sequestering them within parentheses, setting them off by dashes or distinguishing them by font. The effect is "distancing" - disorienting - disconcerting. As if certain words were so suspect - sordid - as to require "handling" by tweezers or being pinched between fingertips, the way one might hold a (soiled) tissue. "The Man Without a Shadow" spans three decades and is set almost entirely within the confines of the University Neurological Institute at Darven Park, Pa. Its plot focuses on the relationship between Margot Sharpe (she is about to turn 24 when we meet her in 1965, a graduate student and brand-new research assistant in the memory lab) and Elihu Hoopes, or E.H., as he is called in the scientific literature. An infection left him, at 37, suffering from untreatable anterograde amnesia. That is, he remembers most of his life leading up to the illness but is incapable of forming any new memories. Once a successful businessman, he now lives with an elderly aunt and spends his days undergoing tests (sometimes cruel, even sadistic) at the institute. E.H. is gentlemanly. E.H. "emanates an air of manly charisma" E.H. is "unexpectedly tall." His skin "exudes a warm glow." He is "something of an artist," the scion of a distinguished old Main Line family, a former seminary student and civil rights activist. To top it off, he is famous in a highly particular way. As Dr. Milton Ferris, the principal investigator of Project E.H., says, he "will possibly be one of the most famous amnesiacs in the history of neuroscience." In other words, E.H. is the kind of fellow to make an impressionable young neuro-psychologist swoon. Or go "dry-mouthed and tremulous," as Margot Sharpe does, encountering him for the first time. But she's a practical young woman, and even in the midst of being dazzled by this vision of preppy, tragic masculinity she doesn't fail to register the boon he might be to her career, or to intuit the impact he will have on her life. In fact, E.H. becomes her life - or, more accurately, what she chooses in lieu of a life. He serves as the unwitting tabula rasa on which she projects all her hopes and fantasies. If Elihu Hoopes is the helpless prisoner of his affliction, Margot Sharpe will spend the better part of her years contorting herself into an amalgam of jailer, savior and ultimately fellow captive. At once ferocious and submissive, Margot is acutely aware of the caste system she must navigate in order to succeed as a female scientist. She learns to think of herself as the Chaste Daughter to Milton Ferris's all-powerful paterfamilias. When they enter into a sexual affair, she recasts herself adeptly (with the aid of whiskey and willed forgetfulness) so as to reap professional benefits while tamping down shame. She turns powerlessness into attainment through an alchemy of the most morally dubious sort. We are frequently told that she is thin, possibly anorexic, and her self-starvation carries over into her emotional life. Not only does she have very little relationship with her family, she seems oblivious to the meagerness of that relationship. Not only is she virtually friendless, she seems unaware of the impoverishment of her entire existence. For obvious reasons, E.H. also lacks awareness, but as he ages, memories from his early life increasingly trouble him and his chivalrous demeanor begins to betray alarming cracks. The threat of violence has been telegraphed from the novel's opening pages, and Margot has fantasized about E.H.'s ability to hurt her. The book devotes much space to a mystery in E.H.'s past. He obsessively draws a drowned, naked girl floating in a stream. We hear repeatedly about a plane crash, knives, a jilted fiancée. We are subjected to many reminders of E.H.'s commitment to civil rights - always in the most generic terms: He "marched with Negroes" and considered Martin Luther King Jr. a hero. It's hinted that his work in "the Movement" might have sparked an appetite for violence. All these threads are developed excessively and unconvincingly, and when the knots are at last unraveled, the payoff is anti climactic, perhaps because this whole subplot was never integral to the book's central concerns. These concerns involve vital questions: What is the nature of the self, and what is the relation of memory to the self? What kind of personal identity is possible when we lack the ability to sustain a continuous narrative? What kind of identity is possible when we choose stagnation and delusion over growth and reality? And no less trenchant: What sources of power are available to a woman in a male-dominated field? How does she negotiate the collision of professional ambition, sexual desire and medical ethics? How does a person whose memory is not impaired construct a narrative of the self? Throughout her career, Oates has demonstrated an uncanny knack for plowing straight into difficult, essential terrain. But why "uncanny"? Why not simply say "a knack"? Because of the fault line that runs between the subjects she rehearses again and again - violence, betrayal and shame, sexual and otherwise - and the sense that although she is drawn to them, she has not discovered much that is new about them. It's as if this material mesmerizes her so utterly that it impedes the full range of her power to interrogate it, as if she's examining it not in full daylight or even in the bright glare of the laboratory but only in the bleakest reaches, only in the shadows. Oates could hardly be accused of writerly timidity. In terms of her output, her unapologetic appetite for working across genres, her incisive intelligence, she's a paragon of boldness. Yet this novel, much like its protagonist, seems an unstable alloy of ferocity and submission. As I read it, I couldn't help thinking of Oates's assertion that when watching a boxing match she tends to identify with "the losing or hurt boxer," and wondering if this notion of victim hood continues to hold her in thrall. The book poses such large questions, yet restricts itself to such small answers. Early on, we learn that E.H. has a flattened affect, "as a caricature is a flattened portrait of the complexity of human personality." In confining her search to the realm of darkness and depravity, Oates has flattened the potential complexity of her own novel. LEAH HAGER COHEN'S most recent novel is "No Book but the World." How to handle the collision of professional ambition, sexual desire and medical ethics?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 7, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Margo Sharpe is an anxiously ambitious graduate student in a cutting-edge neuropsychology lab, in 1965, when she first encounters Elihu Hoopes. The scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, Eli is tall, tailored, and charming, which camouflages his severe mental limitations until one speaks with him for 70 seconds. Eli can crisply recall the first 37 years of his life, but after a viral infection savaged his brain while he was camping alone in the Adirondacks, he is unable to form new memories. Smart, cultured, and congenial, he is the ideal neuroscience research subject, and Margo, high-strung and obsessive, becomes fascinated with Eli to the point of wildly unethical fanaticism. She becomes famous for the results of the grueling experiments she puts Eli through, while he, haunted by a secret childhood tragedy, grows increasingly angry and volatile. Masterful in her articulation of distressed psyches and intimate predator-prey relationships, Oates (The Sacrifice, 2015) is in her element in the world of neuroscience, drawing on ardent research and her gothic imagination and deploying her eerie, incantatory style to dramatize the torment of mental impairment--Eli's amnesia and Margo's monomania as well as the wonder and ruthlessness of science. This complexly suspenseful and darkly erotic duel between a lovesick mad scientist and her beleaguered yet far from helpless subject illuminates, with strobe-light intensity, the labyrinthine mysteries of our brains and minds. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Oates' latest daring novel is charged with the excitement of a scientific thriller and can be recommended to Oates devotees and all readers seeking smart and unnerving page-turners.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A bizarre medical condition-anterograde amnesia-is the linchpin holding together Oates's latest novel, a profound and moving meditation on how memory shapes our personalities and, by extension, the emotions that we provoke in others. When neuroscientist Margot Sharpe first meets Elihu Hoopes in 1965 at a neuropsychology lab in Darven Park, Penn., he is a 37-year-old man whose brain has been devastated irreversibly by encephalitis. Although Eli (as everyone calls him) can remember incidents before his illness with great thoroughness, his short-term memories last no longer than 70 seconds. Over the next three decades of scientific study, Margot learns remarkable things about the neurological foundation of memory from Eli, who in his mind is eternally 37 years old. She also falls in love with him-or, at least, the man she thinks he is. Occasionally, Eli is prone to unpredictably violent outbursts that shock Margot, and in a typically edgy fashion, Oates suggests that, in addition to the memories that he can't retain, Eli has memories that he won't reveal. With her usual skill and panache, Oates writes as though she has known her characters all their lives. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins and Associates. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Oates's latest novel is an unusual love story between a man with severe amnesia and the neurophysiologist who studies him over decades. Elihu (Eli) Hoopes suffers a brain injury that leaves him unable to retain any new memories longer than 70 seconds. Thus he is unable to remember the person he's currently having a conversation with, let alone someone he has met multiple times since the onset of his condition. Yet he retains earlier memories and is haunted by a traumatic incident from his childhood. Dr. Margot Sharpe begins as a junior scientist under the thrall of the arrogant and manipulative Milton Ferris, but over the years she becomes the principal investigator in a series of groundbreaking studies in human memory function. Meanwhile, her growing attachment to Eli increasingly crosses ethical boundaries. Verdict Oates's narrative style ingeniously reflects the subject matter. The prose is clinical, keeping us at a somewhat emotional distance, as befits a scientific study. Similarly, the virtual erasing of Eli's short-term memory on a constant basis means a lot of repetition. Nevertheless, the reader is drawn in as Margot weaves her way into Eli's subconscious, and the impossible love story is ultimately heartbreaking. Highly recommended.-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Oates explores the lives of an amnesiac and the neuroscientist who studies and adores him. Elihu "Eli" Hoopes, who will be forever known in the annals of science as E.H., loses his short-term memory as a consequence of encephalitis at age 37. The scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, this would-be leftist-turned-stockbroker contracted the fever at the Hoopes' lodge on Lake George. Referred in 1965 to psychologists at the University Neurological Institute, he becomes, in effect, a career guinea pig, subjected daily to various tests by the illustrious Dr. Milton Ferris and his staff, which includes 24-year-old graduate student Margot Sharpe. However avidly he takes notes and makes sketches, Eli can't retain memories of anyone he meets. He greets everyone as if for the first time, with an affable "hel-lo." Where most of his family is concerned, the forgetting is mutualthey have abandoned him to the care of an aunt. Eli ruminates obsessively about his past since his memories of the years before 1965 are intact. Many of his charcoal drawings depict the figure of a drowned girl, around 11 years old, beneath the surface of a stream near Lake George. Eli's italicized thoughts about this girl introduce a murder mystery: his cousin Gretchen disappeared one summer, and the Hoopeses hushed it up. Is Eli the killer? As Margot ages and advances in academia, her private life becomes increasingly fraughtshe has an affair with Ferris, a married womanizer, and allows him to pillage her ideas but refuses to expose himand then she begins an affair with Eli. Oates excels at creating spooky, off-kilter atmospherics, less so at funneling scientific data onto the page in digestible chunks. The maze of memory is an ideal setting for Oates' trademark mixture of melodrama and pathos. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
