Man Walks In a Room, by Nicole Krauss

SPOILER ALERT--plot giveaway

I picked this book up at the Baltimore Book Festival where they were selling two books for $15.  I chose it because my daughter had effused about another book by Krauss.  I recall starting that book and losing interest before finishing.  This one I did finish but don’t recommend.  I kept expecting the story to lead somewhere significant, important, or meaningful, somewhere that would make the not insignificant time spent reading it worthwhile, some payback on the investment.  But no.  

The premise is interesting enough.  A man, Samson, has a brain tumor that erases all memories between the ages of 12 and 36, his current age.  It’s easy to imagine how difficult that would be for him, as well as for those close to him.  Good material for a short story.  Krauss extends the plot by inventing a scientific project, secluded in the Nevada desert, complete with nerds and supercomputers, with the goal of recording memories from one person and implanting them in another.  Samson is a perfect candidate for implantation because of the 24 year empty space in his memory.  There are problems, obviously, but for me this experiment didn’t make for the event that the story turns on, as it could have and probably should have.  As it turned out, the weird experiment had to compete with the unusual memory loss for thematic dominance.  That is, it left me wondering which theme the story was about.  Things fall apart in Samson’s life, not surprisingly, with a series of pathetic misadventures.  In the end (SPOILER ALERT) he has an unconvincing reconciliation with his situation, and we are left to accept that he moves on with his life.

I like Krauss's writing, especially her descriptive language.  “Samson stood by the window watching the flakes of snow, each an original, irreducible fact, fall through the lamplight.”  The “irreducible fact” is a compelling term, one I’ve never before associated with snowflakes, but that bears powerful meaning in a story about thought and memory.  Bursts of descriptive brilliance are not uncommon in the story and were enough to keep me going, those and the hope of the story eventually leading to a conclusion worth of the premise.  Ultimately I was disappointed.