A World On the Other Side of the Lethe

It is, as Dan Quayle famously reminded us, a terrible thing to lose one's mind. But in Margot Livesey's disappointing new novel The Missing World, mind is lost, and for some, the loss is a cause for celebration.

Memory is a topic of inherent interest and easy terror-we guard our memories closely, and the prospect of losing them is horrific. What we recall of our own past is connected to how we identify ourselves in the present. Amnesia takes ourselves away from ourselves. We reserve a special pity for characters who lose memory, like Funes the Memorious in Borges' short story, or Rosanna Arquette in Desperately Seeking Susan.

And so when Livesey portrays that most vulnerable side of Hazel Ransome's mind under attack, our natural impulse is to fear for her safety. Hazel, the amnesiac at the center of things, loses her memory, and in an improbable web of deceit, her ex-fianc Jonathan scrambles to keep it hidden. During a phone call with Jonathan, Hazel goes unconscious for a short while, slips into violent seizures, then reawakens with no memory of the last three years. Those three years were traumatically eventful-she fought with her lover over his infidelities, moved out of his apartment and appeared to be ready to move on in life.

The rest of the novel unfolds emotionally and sometimes comically. Jonathan, a beekeeper and insurance adjuster of low character, sees his opening: he keeps Hazel in his home, trying desperately to keep Hazel ignorant of their disputes. Meanwhile, an eclectic bunch comes to her rescue: Freddie, a black American roofer, Charlotte, an out-of-work actress and inveterate moocher, and Mr. Early, a designer of mannequin parts.

The driving tension behind The Missing World-a tension that gets tiresome quickly-is Jonathan's torment at having to reveal the truth about his relationship with Hazel. He wants her back, and will take advantage of her amnesia to win her back. He agonizes over his decisions, but always manages to rationalize keeping her in the dark.

The horror of Hazel's forgetfulness is intense, and her effects are usually right on the money. We feel sad for Hazel, and Jonathan's treachery is repulsive both in action and thought. That natural repulsion is, I'm afraid, exploited to an unpleasant degree. A character without memory is just too easy to put in danger. This is the literary equivalent of going after the family pet in a horror flick: the victim is a helpless pawn whom we have little chance to meet properly, and thus have little incentive to care about in any specific sense. Put simply, it's a cheap way to build drama.

A charitable description of Hazel's ignorance is ''dramatic irony''; a blunter critic would just call it a melodramatic contrivance. There is evidence of research into both the history and psychology of memory (she retells the story of Simonides, the Greek lyric poet who invented the art of memory), but in the end the book says little about memory, except that we can on occasion have a love-hate relation with our own sense of the past. At one point Jonathan wonders whether it might have been better if both he and Hazel had lost memory. Livesey has rightly called into question the value of memory per se, but only after too much excessive and extraneous complication.

And when Livesey announces, in a note at the book's end, that she has drawn inspiration from great memory scholars such as Frances Yates, Jonathan Spence, A. R. Luria and Harvard's psychology department chair, Daniel L. Schacter, one wonders how she could have sapped those wonderful writers of their vitality. In comparison to Livesey, Luria's account of the Russian mnemonist Sherevskii is refreshingly direct and insightful, and there is more to learn about memory from a chapter of Spence's Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci than from the whole of this failed comedy. What this ultimately shows is that an effective psychological novel, unlike this one, is meaningful on a deeper level than these plot contrivances will allow. Truth is stranger, and more interesting to read about, than this fiction.