By Val Emmich
(Little, Brown and Company, 310 pp, $26)
Memory is tricky. Why can I still recite a poem seared into my soul at 17 but can't remember where I parked my car three hours ago?
Some of it is that Louis Simpson was eminently more enjoyable than level 2, space 319. While scientists study the brain's mysteries, it takes an artist to create the world of someone with an extraordinary type of memory.
This enchanting novel has two narrators, Joan, a 10-year-old with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, and Gavin, an actor whose longtime partner died suddenly. Set mostly in Jersey City, where Val Emmich a singer, songwriter and actor lives, this debut novel explores a sweet friendship.
Joan's parents, Ollie and Paige, have been buddies with Gavin for years. Gavin was Ollie's Rutgers University roommate, and his late partner, Sydney, was Paige's lifelong friend. They all grew up in New Jersey. Lovers of Rutgers' famed grease trucks will appreciate this passage when Ollie and Paige return to New Brunswick for lunch.
"We sit on the curb with our massive sandwiches, just like we did all those years ago. A Fat Darrell for me and a Fat Sal for her. There can be no doubt - we'll be sick if we finish these sandwiches. Also true - we will finish them."
The book opens a month after Gavin found Sydney's lifeless body. A marketing executive, among Syd's gifts was the ability to truly listen and make people feel important. Desperate to exorcise the miasma of misery consuming him, Gavin decides to burn Sydney's possessions in a fire in their Los Feliz, Calif., backyard. It does not go well, the fire spreads, but no one is hurt.
A TV actor, Gavin is famous so of course his reckless act is caught on video and goes viral, prompting him to finally return home to New Jersey. He stays with his old pals, Paige and Ollie, and tries to heal. There, Gavin mines Joan's memories of Syd and tries to make sense of Syd's most recent trips to New York and New Jersey.
'The Reminders' is told from two perspectives, a little girl destined to remember everything and a man trying to forget.
As much as Gavin wants to forget and be forgotten, Joan must remember and wants to be remembered.
Joan has total recall as long as it happened to her. (She has the same sort of memory as Marilu Henner, where she precisely remembers everything that has happened to her and the date.)
Joan, whose middle name is Lennon - say it with a British accent and it sounds like John Lennon - and her dad share a deep love of the Beatles. In a nod to the Beatles, the book's sections have the band and John Lennon song titles, "Gimme Some Truth," "Help!" "Don't Let Me Down."
Ollie, a musician, who taught Joan to play guitar, had been writing music for TV commercials. And Paige is a teacher, but money is too tight and the couple decides to shutter Ollie's at-home studio and rent the space.
Once Ollie and Gavin had a band; Gavin wrote lyrics and sang. Joan has a great idea she's certain will help everyone. She enters the Next Great Songwriter Contest. If her song is a hit then she will be forever remembered, like John Lennon. Plus she'll make money and her dad can keep the studio.
Despite being very smart and able to remember everything since she fell on her head at Home Depot at 2, Joan is emotionally 10. The beauty of this novel is that Emmich never condescends when he's writing from Joan's perspective. And it's never a big deal that Gavin is gay.
Here Joan asked Gavin his favorite memory of Syd and what he conjures up are the mundane moments of a couple's life.
"The time he put way too much chili sauce in his pho and started dripping sweat and I couldn't stop laughing. Or the time we took a road trip out to the Salton Sea and checked into a dank motel where we discovered a suspicious hole in our window the size of a bullet; we held each other extra-tight that night. Or both of us shedding tears at the exact same moment while watching Sigur Ros perform at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Or the time I had the flu and Syd took the day off from work and sat with me in bed with his laptop while I watched a ten-hour marathon of House Hunters."
All of the characters grow throughout the book, making Emmich's novel worthy of being remembered.