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New West Book Review

Boise Writer Explores the Power and Limits of Human Memory in “Memory Wall”

By Jenny Shank, 8-17-10

Memory Wall
By Anthony Doerr
Scribner, 243 pages, $24

Boise’s Anthony Doerr is the current Writer-in-Residence for the State of Idaho and he’s won just about every possible award for his short fiction.  It only takes a few sentences into his fascinating new collection, Memory Wall, to understand why he’s so acclaimed.  In these six stories, Doerr transports the reader from South Africa to China to Wyoming to Lithuania to Idaho in an exploration of the power and limits of human memory, an apt subject at a time when, as Nicholas Carr noted in The Shallows, many people are turning their memory functions over to the Internet. 

Doerr addresses this theme of using devices to aid with memory in the moving title novella, which tells the story of 74-year-old Alma Konachek, who lives in a suburb of Cape Town and is succumbing to dementia, her “house boy” Pheko, who cares for her and for his young son, and of the two men who are trying to mine her memories for fortune.  In this futuristic narrative, Alma, a wealthy white woman, has been fitted with a “remote stimulator”: “ports” in her head into which she can insert cartridges that play her lifetime of memories, one by one.  But Alma has deteriorated rapidly since the death of her husband, several years before the start of the story.  Pheko must do everything for her, and soon he will be dismissed so that Alma can be sent to a home, losing the income he depends on to raise his son.

Meanwhile, as Doerr writes, “Occasionally the cartridges are traded on the streets.  Old-timers in nursing homes, it’s been reported, are using memory machines like drugs.” Roger Tshoni has studied Alma, knows she’s visited the memory clinic, and remembers the account of her husband, a fossil hunter, who died of a heart attack shortly after discovering a priceless “gorgon” fossil, an expedition on which Alma accompanied him.  Roger repeatedly breaks into Alma’s house, knowing she is too far gone to do anything about it, and systematically feeds cartridges into the crudely implanted ports in the head of his accomplice, the 15-year-old “memory-tapper” named Luvo.  Roger is looking for the cartridge that records the location of the valuable fossil find.  “Memory Wall” takes many surprising turns, and although it’s set in a faraway place in a future time, the humanity of its characters is deeply felt and conveyed.

Doerr writes in precise, scientific language that makes any subject fresh, and his characters are all sympathetic, even the most flawed ones.  You can’t help but care for them and root for them to achieve the things they want, even when they are at cross purposes with each other.  Many of Doerr’s characters are orphans, the last people in the world to remember their own childhoods, which makes hanging onto memories all the more vital for their survival.

“Procreate, Generate” addresses the infertility of a Wyoming couple, Imogene, whose parents died when she was in her twenties, and her husband Herb.  The struggle of people to become pregnant is a common story, but Doerr writes in such novel prose that it makes it seem as though he is the first to address this subject.  He examines the situation on a molecular level, as when Herb and Imogene have sex and in Imogene’s “imagination their chromosomes stitch themselves together with the smallest imaginable sound: two teeth in a zipper locking.” They fail to achieve a pregnancy, or as Doerr puts it, “seventy-five trillion cells in their bodies and they can’t get two of them together.” They go for fertility testing, and I don’t think I’ve ever read such a lovely, symbolic description of a person undergoing an X-Ray as the one in that scene:  “The nurse steps away; Imogene hears the machine come to life, hears the high whine of electrons piling up.  She closes her eyes, tries not to move.  The light pours into her.”

Another stand-out story is “Village 113,” which was included in a recent O. Henry Award anthology.  In it, an elderly Chinese woman who has earned her living as a “seed keeper” for her village resists being transplanted to the city so that the government can proceed with its Three Gorges Dam project.  Her son is a government employee whose job is to return to his village and convince the townspeople to accept the settlement money and relocate.  But his mother proves the hardest to convince, and in the end, only she and an elderly schoolteacher are left in the ghost village just before it is flooded.  This haunting story is filled with the woman’s tender recollections of her village, the only place she’s ever known.  “Here is the Park of Heroes,” she thinks, “here are the ginkgo trees, a procession in the dark.  Here are the ancient lions, their backs polished from five centuries of child-riders.  Every full moon, her mother used to say, the lions come to life and pad around the village, peering in windows, sniffing at trees.”

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argued that it’s our memories and our ability to reflect deeply that make us most human.  In Memory Wall, Anthony Doerr shows his characters at their most human, holding on to their memories for dear life.

Anthony Doerr will participate in Write by the River Writers’ Retreat on September 18 in Garden Valley, Idaho, and he’ll be at Wordstock in Portland, Oreg. from October 8 through 10.

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