DH: It’s a bright moment for any reader of contemporary American literature when they discover a debut novel as self-assured, as well-disciplined, as You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin.
RB’s first person narrator, Victor, is a 60-ish research scientist, a director of a project investigating Alzheimer’s at a privately funded think tank on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. If you’ve ever had a desire to sample Maine’s offshore recreational beauty in a book, if you’ve ever wondered what Bar Harbor is like, then this is a must-read novel. Baldwin’s sense of place, his commitment to what it means to be a local, never deserts him.
This is a novel, in part, about science. I consider it fiction from the distaff side, from the non-liberal arts side. That’s refreshing. I’ve had two close friends who were scientists, a physicist and an engineer. So I think I know the mind-set and RB has nailed it. Even down to several references to Singing in the Rain. My physicist friend loved talking about Singing in the Rain. Why? Because it’s the musical for geeks. It’s “plot”, if musicals can be said to have plots, is about the awkward transition from silent pictures to the talkies, making wacky comedy out of all the technical glitches. And yes, I agree that Donald O’Connor is underrated. Throw-away culture lines…there are dozens in this novel.
Film and music references litter this narrative like shells you’d pick up on the beach. But they’re well embedded in the sand. Characters cite twists and turns of classic movie plots to deepen their insights, like when an encounter on the beach reminds someone of a similar encounter in La Dolce Vita. An easy acquaintance with the TCM movie catalog would enhance your enjoyment of this story.
Victor, our middle aged narrator has a dedicated stereo room, costing many thousands. Guys love their cars and stereo equipment. They love collecting recordings. I don’t know why. I found myself ticking off all the classical references in Victor’s collection from Chopin Mazurkas to Shostakovich String Quartets to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.
The film and music references add some extra heft to RB’s dialogue patterns. And it adds to Victor’s sometime relationship with Regina, a much younger science researcher, that’s she’s an aspiring poet, since Victor’s relationship to Regina is as awkward as his approach to poetry. The liberal arts side of culture comes off as a terra incognita when viewed from the hard science POV and that’s all to the good for this novel’s swing. We’re viewing what the arts look like from the research lab. And RB knows that research lab, what it’s like to work there, what it’s like to scramble for funding. What did you study before you decided to become an novelist, RB? Pre-med? It’s not that often that I come across a novelist who seems like he would make an excellent surgeon.
RB owns great technique for adding depth to his narrative by having his characters talk about other characters, by making Betsy, an elderly aunt, into a gossip hound. We sense the gossip on Mount Desert Island as if it were an off-shore breeze. And it’s neat that Victor ends up as its principal subject. We also get Victor’s memories, most especially of his dead wife, Sara. This is a novel about a man whose profession is to understand how memory twists and turns in the wind, is lost…and the struggle to forestall that loss. Rosecrans Baldwin likes narrative mirroring. This novel is built like a skiff that won’t capsize because every plank in it is mutually reinforcing.
Victor is as disconnected as his stereo system is not. There’s a simply wonderful short scene with his best friend, Randall, who has just concluded a visit and is pushing off. As Randall leaves, Victor realizes that he doesn’t care if he ever sees him again. Just like that. His best friend and he doesn’t care. Randall has asked, imposed really, his looking-for-direction daughter, Cornelia, on Victor until she straightens herself out. RB ties up his story lines as well as an old sea dog can tie sailor’s knots.
You Lost Me There is full of well-drawn women characters. It’s a good sign for the reader when you can remember their names. Betsy, elderly aunt and island native, Regina, sometime mistress, Cornelia, his best friend’s daughter, Lucy, colleague in the lab, and Victor’s wife, Sara. Sara was a writer who didn’t believe in seat belts, living now only in her words. As for the guys: disaffected, prima donnas with penises.
Sara, before she died, was filling out index cards at the suggestion of their marriage counsellor: five sets of cards for five turning points in their marriage. The chapters of You Lost Me There are divided into five corresponding sections. In each section, Victor goes to read the next set of his deceased wife’s cards. He’s gobsmacked with their POV of key incidents in their marriage, some of which he doesn’t remember or remembers very differently. Sara and Victor were married to each other. But they were both in a different marriage.
If there’s a fault in this grand machine of narrative, it’s near the end where Baldwin falters from showing into telling, into explaining what Victor should be feeling through an imaginary conversation with the spirit of his wife. It’s sort of like the hoary ghost of Sara rises up out of the surf to chasten Victor into the proper mode of mourning for her and for his own shortcomings. There’s not literally a ghost in this story but it’s as close to a ghost as a scientist can get. It’s memories functioning as ghosts.
You Lost Me There is an tight-assed debut of a novel, a terrific, intellectual read. But I’d rather conclude a book and say: “What the hell did that mean?”, than have the writer tell me what it means.
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