TITLE: Turn of Mind
AUTHOR: Alice LaPlante
GENRE: General Fiction/Literary Thriller/Mystery
PUBLISHED: February 11, 2014
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Description: A stunning first novel, both literary and thriller, about a retired orthopedic surgeon with dementia, Turn of Mind has already received worldwide attention. With unmatched patience and a pulsating intensity, Alice LaPlante brings us deep into a brilliant woman’s deteriorating mind, where the impossibility of recognizing reality can be both a blessing and a curse.
As the book opens, Dr. Jennifer White’s best friend, Amanda, who lived down the block, has been killed, and four fingers surgically removed from her hand. Dr. White is the prime suspect and she herself doesn’t know whether she did it. Told in White’s own voice, fractured and eloquent, a picture emerges of the surprisingly intimate, complex alliance between these life-long friends—two proud, forceful women who were at times each other’s most formidable adversaries. As the investigation into the murder deepens and White’s relationships with her live-in caretaker and two grown children intensify, a chilling question lingers: is White’s shattered memory preventing her from revealing the truth or helping her to hide it?
A startling portrait of a disintegrating mind clinging to bits of reality through anger, frustration, shame, and unspeakable loss, Turn of Mind is a remarkable debut that examines the deception and frailty of memory and how it defines our very existence.
Review: Turn of Mind reached out and grabbed my attention in the first paragraph...
Something has happened. You can always tell. You come to and find wreckage: a smashed lamp, a devastated human face that shivers on the verge of being recognizable. Occasionally someone in uniform: a paramedic, a nurse. A hand extended with a pill. Or poised to insert a needle.
This time, I am in a room, sitting on a cold metal folding chair. The room is not familiar but I am used to that. I look for clues.
I am a sucker for a good opening page, and from the first paragraph Alice LaPlante introduces the kind of fascinating, flawed characters I enjoy the most. In this case, the narrator is Dr. Jennifer White, a brilliant hand surgeon forced into early retirement due to early-onset Alzheimer's. While she was in college, she first considered medieval art history, but soon met a young medical student who saw she had the skills and desire for surgery and took the time to mentor her. Good thing too, as it turned out - she loved surgery - in fact would operate on anyone, at any time, taking the most hopeless cases. As one of her colleagues jokes, "she's a hammer looking for a nail". She chose to specialize in surgery of the hands because as she says...
“Not for me the hearts, the lungs, or the esophagus…I want the hands, the fingers, the things that connect us to the things of the world.”
Unfortunately, Jennifer is not only stricken with Alzheimer's disease and stripped of her beloved career, but she is now a person of interest in the murder of an elderly woman. Even worse, the victim is her longtime friend and neighbor, Amanda. Amanda was a good friend to Jennifer, a godmother to her daughter, but occasionally she had to have a cruel streak and seemed jealous of Jennifer's success. The body itself was found dead due to blunt force trauma to the head, but four of her fingers were inexplicably surgically amputated. In the opening chapter, Jennifer is in the police station and devastated to find out her friend is dead.
Amanda? Dead? I cannot believe it. My dear, dear friend. Second mother to my children. My ally in the neighborhood. My sister.
If not for Amanda, I would have been alone. I was different. Always apart. The cheese stands alone. Not that anyone knew. They were fooled by surfaces. so easy to dupe. No one understood weaknesses like Amanda. She saw me, saved me from my secret solitude. And where was I when she needed me? Here. Three doors down. Wallowing in my woes. While she suffered. While some monster brandished a knife, pushed in for the kill.
She weeps and cries out - and the police are exasperated. It's not the first time she's been told of her friend's murder. She just can't remember, she fades in and out. Most of the time she lives in the past.
Jennifer's memories of past events, thoughts and details of her day to day life are chronicled in a journal that her caretaker, Magdelena, helps her maintain. Unfortunately, Jennifer has no memory of what happened on the day Amanda was murdered, and the calendar is blank that day. Her memory is faulty more often than not: she believed her husband, James, was still alive (he died of a heart attack two years prior), occasionally she believed her children were small (when she remembers them at all). Occasionally, she believed she was still a young medical student, or had a case waiting in the operation room. We are able to view the disintegration of Jennifer's mind from a first personal narrative, sometimes uncovering a fact that stuck in her mind one moment, only to slip away the next. These moments of lucidity give the reader insight as to who might have killed Amanda and give some theories as to why.
The first person viewpoint from such an unreliable narrator made the story disjointed and confusing, but also strangely compelling. We are constantly reminded of how crippling memory loss really is, and how heartless Alzheimer's disease can be. Tragically, Jennifer herself on a "good day" writes this in her journal...
"This half state. Life in the shadows. As the neurofibrillary tangles proliferate, as the neuritic plaques harden, as synapses cease to fire and my mind rots out, I remain aware. An unanesthetized patient."
It is also through Jennifer’s "good day" journal reminiscences, that we get to know her husband, James, and her grown children, Mark and Fiona. Mark, like his father, is a young lawyer, but unlike his father, he has a substance abuse problem and is irresponsible with money - Jennifer instinctively does not trust him. Her daughter is the trustworthy one, caring and sweet, but seems to have some secrets she won't share. Her two children often write notes in her journal telling her not to trust the other one. We get to know the victim, Amanda, and a little bit about Amanda's husband, Peter. We get to know Magdelena, her caregiver, with a few secrets of her own. Beat of all, we grown to know and understand Jennifer herself, a woman who was highly intelligent, often brusque and dismissive, and at times, formidable. She had the strength to do what had to be done including keeping her marriage together after learning her husband was unfaithful.
As Jennifer’s condition deteriorates and she becomes more and more dependent and confused, the atmosphere of the book becomes fearful, and her images grow more and more haunting and unsettling. If not watched carefully, especially at night, Jennifer tends to wander around her neighborhood to "visit" her friend, or she tries to take a cab to "get to work." Jennifer becomes more and more confused, the past is blurred with the present, and it was heartrending to see.
The visits from the police continue, of course, and they grow more and more insistent and rude as Jennifer gives them less and less. One of the police investigators seems sympathetic, her partner also suffered from early onset Alzheimer's. Of course, Jennifer is not competent to stand trial, but if she is found guilty, her lawyer promises her a clean, comfortable state institution. The ending, at least to me, was a surprise. I knew the answers could be found with the people closest to her, but I didn't see the twist coming.
Overall, I would say this book reminded me of a combination of Still Alice and the movie, Memento. This is one of the first eBooks I ever bought and it was worth every penny. I have reread this one several times. Yes, I had long solved the mystery, but I wanted to hear Jennifer's voice again. By the end of the book, I felt as if she were an old friend. Five enthusiastic stars.
Alas, Alice La Plante's second novel, A Circle of Wives, was a huge disappointment to me. It seemed to be written by another author entirely. Still, I am impressed with her first book enough that I look forward to her next effort with anticipation.