Thursday, March 3, 2016

Review: Find Me

Find Me Find Me by Laura van den Berg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Find Me" is an ethereal, eerie character piece about displacement. Its post-apocalyptic backdrop that feels almost inconsequential to the story, which focuses on a young woman named Joy and her hazy wandering existence, both in this new world and in the past. It's very much a 'literary' novel doing what a lot of 'literary' novels are doing lately - snatching bits and pieces of the sci-fi genre and weaving them into more mainstream (or prestigious) genres. I like this trend - the more SF the better! - but I'm also a little wary, as authors sometimes try to deny the SF-ness of their writing to keep themselves out of the genre ghetto. Either way, the SF premise drew me in, and while it didn't turn out to be hugely necessary to the story I wasn't disappointed at all (well, at least in terms of genre).

Joy is in a hospital. At first, it's unclear what kind of hospital she's in, or why. Outsiders gather outside, trying to get into the hospital, and no one in the hospital seems ill. Slowly, we discover that all the patients in this hospital are thought to be immune to a plague sweeping America, one that causes amnesia and then death. Joy suspects she's immune because she's already lost the memories that are important to her. She has recently received her first photo of her mother, and there is a curious year of her life in foster care she doesn't remember at all.

Joy eventually leaves this strange hospital and the people she has met there. She runs into the only foster-brother she's ever cared about while wandering the east coast on a series of sketchy long-distance buses. She's searching for her mother, who she believes she identified from TV as a lost-ship-chaser who lives off the shore of Florida.

Nothing in this book is in the foreground. Joy's memory problems and the inconsistency of memory throughout the story constantly displace both event and emotion. Though the story is roughly chronological, life-changing moments happen off-screen and are not referenced until Joy has digested them enough to temper their emotional impact. Thus the tone perpetuates a constant, unchanging level of emotional valence. Often, this deliberate disaffection creates a clashing contrast with the actual events Joy remembers, and the slow, steady grind of emotion becomes a relentless crashing wave of white noise drowning out all the things Joy should be concerned about but ignores with her single-minded goal.

It's an impressive build, but the question for me is: what does it build to, and how does it land? And, unfortunately, the answers are a disappointing 'not much,' and 'no.' I shouldn't have been surprised (and I wasn't, as the novel neared its end and with only pages left Joy was supposedly only moments away from her mother) that a novel that is primarily about lack and uses lack as a literary device displaces the ending beyond the final page of the book. Perhaps this means for the reader that we must understand Joy's journey is not about the destination, but about the getting there, but for Joy herself this isn't even the case. She has undergone a lot and her life has drastically changed, but her primary concern is still finding her mother and she refuses to foreground any of her more immediate problems.

Still, up until the last page, it was engrossing read. I could have used some closure and I feel the story would've benefited from it, but the author clearly disagrees, and I respect that.

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