Book Review - The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block

Book Review Block, Stefan Merrill. The Story of Forgetting. New York: Random House, 2008


“Once, I fell in love with everything” writes Stefan Merrill Block at the beginning of his first novel The Story of Forgetting. With this one sentence I was hooked. This book tells the stories of Abel Haggard, a elderly hermit who is stuck in the past and Seth Waller, a lonely and precocious 15 year old whose mother is afflicted with a rare and inherited form of early onset Alzheimer's disease. As the stories of Abel Haggard become more inextricably linked, it seems at first as if the only thing these two characters have in common is a memory of stories of a fantastical land called Isidora, which are interwoven throughout the book.

Seth Waller is an intelligent and sensitive teenager living in suburban Austin, who is rejected by his peers. It does not help at all that his mother is becoming increasingly forgetful and absentminded. After his mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease he conducts an “empirical investigation” to determine the source of his mothers affliction as his mothers background is shrouded in mystery. Abel Haggard is a hermit who is becoming increasingly mired in the past, especially the past with his brother and his brothers wife with whom he is in love and their daughter whom he claims as his own. He lives on his broken down family farm on the outskirts of ever encroaching suburban sprawl on the outskirts of Dallas.

Blocks prose is very lyrical and at times almost reads like poetry. The narrative flows along very smoothly and Block does an excellent job of blending all the disparate elements (Abel's story, Seth's story, Seth's “empirical investigation” and the Isidora story) and I though the themes of the Isidora story mirrored perfectly the state of mind in the main narrative at the time. I also felt the Block dealt sensitively with the motivations and feelings of his characters, whether dealing with the emotional baggage of having a familial form of a debilitating disease such as the type of Alzheimer's disease which afflicts Seth's mother which affects half of all descendants of its carriers in the prime of life or dealing with saving the family home in the face of increasing suburban sprawl. I have not read a book which dealt so well with the issue of trying to live while literally living under the threat of what must feel like a genetic time bomb, which may or may not cut short the prime of one's own life or that of one's own children.


In short, I felt that the Story of Forgetting was an excellent debut and I would be very interested in reading more from this young author.

Note: This review is based on the Advanced Reader's Edition.