“What is it I’m supposed to know?” This is the central, haunting question of this first person, fictional account of a man suffering from Alzheimer’s. Jake is a 65- year-old man who has been forgetting things. He bridles at the indignity of being asked to draw something as simple as the face of a clock. Yet when he finishes the drawing, he can tell by the tester’s face that he has failed the task. Looking at the picture himself, he can see that something is wrong with it but he cannot identify the problem.
Samantha Harvey conjures Jake’s foggy state of mind with gentle, spare prose. Being inside his head is like coasting on a wave as the tide recedes; Jake knows he’s trying to reach somewhere he’s been but he’s being dragged away. We float along with him, gathering the story by what the other characters say and how they react.
The book reads more like interconnected stories than a novel, and the facts of Jake’s story are sometimes murky. Maybe we are not meant to understand exactly what has happened. What is painfully clear is that Jake’s interior dwindles until he no longer recognizes his wife, Helen. What reads as sad and dreamy is ultimately terrifying. We learn the sorts of things he is doing from his wife: “Jake, you have put your clothes in the oven.” “Jake, you have fed Lucky five times today, she’ll die if you don’t stop it.” While not everyone will want to immerse themselves in such sadness, this book would be helpful to people who have loved ones with Alzheimer’s.
