MAN WALKS INTO A ROOM, by Nicole Krauss, Nan Talese, 248 pages, $23.95.
If you first read the plot description — Samson Greene, a 36-year-old Columbia University English professor leaves his office one day and disappears, then is found wandering the desert outside Las Vegas, unable to remember anything — you might think, "Big deal."
But "Man Walks Into a Room" is an arresting first novel. Written by a talented and brilliant young woman with a degree in poetry, the novel is lyrical, fascinating and provocative.
When the police identify Samson and notify his wife, Anna, they take him to a hospital where surgeons say he has a "silent tumor," which must be removed from his brain. After surgery, however, he is only able to remember the first 12 years of his life. He returns to New York with Anna, and they try to re-create the life they had together for 10 years.
No matter how much she works with him, he cannot remember his mother's death, his wife's nickname, his dog or the numerous books that line his study.
The result is that both Anna and Samson become frustrated with each other. She feels as though she has lost him, and he avoids her because she expects more from him than he can deliver. Finally, they decide that he should leave and live on his own. "He didn't know how to gently tell her what he'd begun to understand: that the life she was trying to return to him he didn't want."
His mind is undamaged functionally, but amnesia forces him into a new life. He finds pleasure in meeting people who have not known him and therefore expect nothing from him. Even though he is lonely, he is excited to learn new things, meet new people and act in ways that seem natural to him.
The author skillfully creates a situation in which Samson can chart his own course completely unburdened by his past. In fact, he has remarkably little curiosity about his past, no real need to put all the pieces together, even those that lead to his scholarly but forgotten career. He lives his new life with a sense of freedom, uninhibited either intellectually or emotionally.
Eventually, he hooks up with Dr. Ray Malcolm, an enigmatic scientist whose latest project is to try to transfer one person's memory to another.
Even though Malcolm has a measure of success in his experiment, Samson feels violated, as if his mind has been "broken into and vandalized. . . . To enter another's consciousness and stake a flag there was to break the law of absolute solitude on which that consciousness depends."
Even more than Malcolm, Krauss has managed the delicate task of climbing inside a person's mind to study it, and while the reader is first tempted to think this is an unhappy story, at least because the memory loss breaks up a marriage, it is really a very positive look at human nature.
Ironically, Samson discovers through a memory transfer "the key to human compassion."
The author's style is particularly interesting. She writes from a man's point of view and pulls it off convincingly. She understands how a man feels about a woman and the impact a woman has upon him. "Winn was about to protest, but her expression stopped him. Not one of severity but of love, the kind of tender look from an unusually beautiful woman who should not love you but does, that can reduce a man to silence."
And Samson continues to love the beautiful Anna — even though he is not moved to reinvigorate their marriage.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com