The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)The initial premise of the book is terrific. We're in the '60s and a doctor finds himself in a situation on a snowy night in which he must deliver his own child, with the help of his nurse Caroline (who has a secret crush on him). The first child, Paul, is healthy, but the second, a girl, is born with Down's Syndrome. The doctor, David, is convinced his wife Norah will not be able to "handle" the trauma of having such a child, so he decides, in an instant, to hand the poor girl to Caroline and asks her to take it to a home for such children and leave it there, never to mention the girl again. He tells his wife that the daughter has died. Caroline runs to the home,finds it to be a hugely disturbing place, and then looking into the face of this new baby, decides she can love the girl and provide her with a life. She runs off with the baby, ready to start a new and uncertain life.
These initial scenes are fairly well done, and though the decision David makes is abhorrent today...it is somewhat tempered by the fact that in the '60s, we as a society weren't quite so compassionate or understanding of folks with Downs. His logic about sparing his wife is questionable, however, and Edwards fairly effectively shows that the gulf between David's initial guilt and wariness about being caught and Norah's grief at losing a child drives the couple further apart. Norah is not allowed to grieve in the way she wants...for example, she isn't allowed to see the body of her lost daughter...for obvious reasons.
Anyway, after this the book falls apart. Author Kim Edwards, it becomes clear, hasn't learned the lesson of "showing us" how people are feeling and thinking, but telling us. We are told over and over that David's secret has blanketed his family, that it's driven him apart from his wife and son. We never really understand specifically how. Does David just act guilty all the time? Does Norah never get over her depression? Is she unable to show love to her son because she wants her daughter? I found the book to be almost completely unconvincing psychologically.
Also, every character in the book (possibly excepting the daughter Phoebe) is hugely UNLIKEABLE and UNSYMPATHETIC. David is simply a pompous jerk. Her makes this huge decision and then can't understand how his lie might effect other people. He just wants his wife to "get over it." Problem is, we see right from the beginning of the book, before the lie even happens, that this is not a happy couple and not one that should ever have married. Norah, the wife, marries David apparently without love for him, and then resents him for being very successful and providing for her and her son the kind of life she married him to get. We also learn a great deal about David's childhood, and none of that rings very true either...the David we see as an adult isn't convincingly the man the young David would have grown up to be.
The son,Paul, is shown as a typical sullen teenager who is not understood by his overbearing father. He escapes to playing guitar, and what do you know...he's practically a genius at that instrument. He talks about music in a way that no real person ever would...only in a way that writer's who can't show us how a person feels but must have them "tell" us.
On the other side of the story, we have the nurse Caroline. She appears to be somewhat heroic, because she does risk a lot to provide a life for Phoebe. Yet we never see the day to day struggles of dealing with a child with Down's Syndrome. Some brief early scenes are all we get...but the structure of the story skips all the day to day details and we see only the "end result,"...which doesn't seem to have been all that difficult...except that the author "tells" us that it was. While Caroline isn't unsympathetic she's just kind of bland and passive.
At one point in the later part of the book, David returns to his old hometown and meets an unusual character. I don't want to spoil it...but let's just say that this person's actions are totally silly at first, and then later this person is clearly meant to cause a seismic shift in the dynamics of David's family...instead we just kind of scratch our heads and wonder at the strangeness of everyone's behavior. I wish I could tell you more...but if you manage to slog your way this far into the book, you should at least have some surprises left.
It took me FOREVER to get through this poorly written, overwraught book. I kept going because it was SUCH a bestseller and so many people liked it. I guess I just totally missed it. I realize I'm asking to get huge amounts of "unhelpful" ratings, but I feel there must be other lone voices out there like me...who just found the book deeply unsatisfactory.
The only reason it gets two stars instead of one is that the initial premise IS original and was done well enough to make me buy the darn book in the first place and continue reading it in the hopes that the author's imagination would once again provide redemption. No such luck.

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