The Memory Thief by Rachel Keener

Thematic similarities exist between The Memory Thief and Keener's first novel, The Killing Tree.

Once again, we are in the lush and various landscapes of the Carolinas and Tennessee. The Appalachian mountains like a spinal column hold up the geographic setting and the plot. The stage is set by lowland events. The mountains bring clarity, evoke the dénouement of the truth behind the deceptions upon which the characters have structured their lives.

Once again we are taken into the world of class tensions, engaged by delicate characterizations built of spun steel, Keener's deft ear for dialect, and deep insight into the nature of evil.

The story is told from the perspective of three daughters whose lives are joined by adoption and separated by adoption; whose choices, to the extent they have choices, are shaped by the kind of self-righteousness that leads to crippling poverty even in the midst of material wealth.

Angel opens the story with a brief, cryptic description of the night she sets fire to her childhood home, if you want to call it that. Quickly the narrative switches to a recounting of Hannah's story. Angel tells her story in a profoundly affecting, engaging first person, a distinctive and memorable voice. Hannah, a less accessible character to begin with,is suitably conveyed in third person, past tense. It's a successful use of the two techniques.

As is true with all of us, you can't appreciate Hannah's life without some comprehension of the lives her parents have led. Hannah is the late-born only child of Mother and Father, Mother having grown up in an extremely pious family firmly set within a narrow sector of the holiness movement. Father comes to this church setting as an adult, having first sought out the attention of Mother’s sister, only to be rejected by her. Mother was only too happy to step into the place abandoned by her sister. Hannah looks like this ostracized member of Mother’s family, an unhappy coincidence that spurs Mother to greater heights of concern. Is it the case that Mother's need to provide for and protect Hannah is in part driven by an unspoken need to rescue her own sister? If she does this right, will it make taking her sister's place a morally acceptable action?

Hannah is the only child at her school who must live life swaddled in polyester from chin to ankle and wrist to wrist. Watching Hannah struggle leads the parents to adopt Bethie, an orphan from the Philippines, to keep Hannah company in colorless polyester. Bethie struggles to speak, finally retreating from her stutter into communication by means of sign language and writing notes.

The girls' world begins to open on a trip to the Carolina coast when Hannah is sixteen. Largely as a result of boredom, Hannah finds a job, working at a motel with a restaurant. The work is hot. They give her a t-shirt.

The sisters hid in Hannah’s room while Bethie slipped on the extra-small T-shirt. She looked at her reflection and was as amazed as Hannah had been. So many sweet things could be seen. The soft curve of her shoulders. Even the rise and fall of her breath.

Let me keep it, Bethie wrote.

Hannah shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. Mother would kill us.”

Bethie shrugged her shoulders and wrote back, She already has.

Hannah internalizes her Mother’s fears that she will turn out like the aunt she so resembles and eventually takes the concept of modest dress to an extreme. Once again, instead of encouraging Hannah toward a standard less extravagantly at odds with the societal norm, Mother ropes others into aping Hannah, creating another artificial cocoon as she did through the adoption of Bethie. Mother's greatest hope, her cherished dream, is that Hannah will "choose" to be just like Mother. Against any visible probability, Hannah grows in that cocoon.

Angels’ story is in stark contrast to Hannah’s. While Hannah and Bethie’s parents carefully structure every moment of their daughters’ lives, Angel’s parents are present only as sources of danger by neglect as much as action. They provide neither guidance nor sustenance, and Angel grows up almost by accident, by her own lights, ransoming mercy by means of petty theft. There is no romance to this poverty, although Keener conveys well a kind of raw beauty in Angel's intimate relationship to the land. Angel finds in the land a kind of refuge, a bond as profound as it is primal, surpassed eventually by the need that drives her east into the mountains toward the answers she craves.

While Angel is abandoned by her parents’ physical and emotional distance, Hannah is abandoned by her parents' inability to see, to comprehend, by their sacrifice of compassion in the name of a sterile kind of purity. Both Hannah and Angel know what it’s like to be alone in a room full of people, to buy something that looks like acceptance by fabricating a lie of conformity.

Mother, Hannah and Bethie’s Mother, is a compelling character. Equal parts passion and coldness, capable of extreme cruelty precisely because of her devotion to the welfare of the people she mortally wounds, Mother is hypnotic. I wanted to put the book down, I wanted to avert my eyes from her brutality sharp as the edge of a well honed knife. I could not. Mother is as grand and fully realized a character as Lear, horrible and pathetic, powerfully capable of destroying out of love, needing everything to be just so for the glory of God.

Read this book. You won’t regret it.