Books

You've got to be ambitious to write a novel at 24, especially if the topic is a little understood neurological disorder that affects people who are so much older.

EARL KELENY/Special Contributor

In The Story of Forgetting, Plano native Stefan Merrill Block writes convincingly of the horrors of Alzheimer's disease and how it devastates families. In one of the book's opening scenes, 15-year-old Seth Waller finds his confused mother wandering their suburban Austin neighborhood in the middle of the night. He opens the suitcase she carries and finds 20 pounds of rotting lunchmeat that she'd hoarded from the family's refrigerator.

The novel alternates between two points of view. The first belongs to Seth, a loner and only child; the second is that of 70-year-old Abel Haggard, a hermit living on a farm north of Dallas.

Seth's mother, Jamie, is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, so Seth decides to track down her relatives as a way of possibly finding a cure.

He gets the idea from an academic research article, which suggests that having complete genetic histories of every person struck with this Alzheimer's variant could someday stop the disease. But Jamie has kept her past a tightly guarded secret, not even telling her son her maiden name.

Abel, meanwhile, pines for his family. We realize through flashbacks that he had a daughter with his brother's wife. A daughter named Jamie.

It's natural to think that the book's central point would be for Seth and Abel to meet, but Mr. Block doesn't let readers off that easy. He's fascinated by the idea of memories and their evolution through time and science, so we watch as Jamie's type of Alzheimer's blooms in 19th-century England and then spreads to Texas.

Such side plots, while imaginative, drag down the pace of the novel. But Seth keeps us engaged. He's terrified at what's happening to his mother and says so in a precocious way.

As Seth finds the research article that will eventually kick off his journey, he describes reading it as a "sickening and awesome" experience, "like the first time my mom and I read Carl Sagan's Cosmos, or the time I was struck by my first undeniable pang of sexual desire (for Full House's Jodie Sweetin), or the time Mrs. Greer, my old science teacher, had us look at a drop of rainwater under a microscope ... "

Mr. Block has won national attention for this debut novel. But his characters need some fleshing out, and their motivations aren't always clear. Parts of the book seem overwritten, and the punctuation leans a little heavily on the colon, which feels like the author is trying too hard.

Such flaws distract from the book's most engrossing theme: finding normalcy and hope amid darkness.

Mr. Block is at his best when showing Seth as an awkward teenager or breaking down the minute ways that Alzheimer's affects the brain. One insoluble protein that covers the hippocampus and causes people to forget, Mr. Block writes, is an "effect similar to pouring corn syrup over a computer's motherboard." Seth's mother clutches at "the ghost of a thought, bound and desperate, its fingers clawing at a net of neurofibral tangles with no way out."But the ultimate explanation for her secrecy doesn't mesh with the details we've learned about her. It might have been nice to get through the corn syrup on the motherboard and inside her head a little more.

Stefan Merrill Block

(Random House, $25) Plan your life

Stefan Merrill Block will appear at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Barnes & Noble, 801 W. 15th St, Plano.

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