David Henry, who left his poverty-stricken childhood behind when he moved to attend college and then medical school, delivers his own twin children when no other doctor can get to the hospital because of a snow storm. The first child, a son they name Paul, is perfect. The second, a daughter they name Phoebe, has Down's Syndrome. When David looks at her, he thinks of the pain his mother suffered watching his sister, born with a heart defect, die at the age of twelve. To prevent his wife Norah from suffering the same pain, he gives Phoebe to the nurse and asks her to put the baby in an institution, not uncommon in 1964. Intending to tell Norah the truth, when the time comes, David loses his nerve and says the second baby died in childbirth.
Caroline, the nurse who took Phoebe, decides to keep her and raise her as her own daughter and, in doing so, becomes a champion for the rights of disabled children. Over the years, she sends David photos of Phoebe and small notes about her progress. He sends money, envelopes full of twenty dollar bills, to the post office boxes she rents in various cities to prevent him from finding her.
Though Edwards requires too much of the reader at times, demanding that we put aside all disbelief, the novel draws us into the dilemma David faces because of the decision he makes in that one panicked moment and asks us to consider how one decision can shape our life and the lives of those we touch.
We see David’s care and love for Norah and Paul, their son, how he tries too hard to protect them from pain and how, in trying to save others, he creates greater pain for himself and his family as the secret he carries becomes a gulf between them that widens over the years, three people living in the same house yet separate, almost untouchable.
The singular weakness of the novel is that we sympathize with David too much to reconcile the man Paul and Norah talk about with the man we come to know. Edwards allows us to see David’s love and sorrow, both about his deceased sister and Phoebe. He struggles with a sense of moral responsibility so out of proportion to the human that he feels he is to blame for every poor decision any of them make. How can Edwards expect us to sympathize with Norah when she begins to have a series of affairs? It is clear that we, like Norah and David himself, who discovers her affairs early, are meant to see Norah’s choices as mere reactions to David’s aloofness and therefore David’s fault.
Norah suffers no ramifications for her deliberate decisions to betray her family, unlike David, who must pay for his one decision to the last drop. Edwards implies that Paul is angry when he finds his mother’s clothes on the beach and realizes she’s having an affair with some man they’ve all just met on their vacation, yet we have no indication that his anger lasted or affected his relationship with his mother, yet he stays angry at David.
Paul comes across as spoiled and whiney, yet in the end, it is he who forgives David for being an imperfect father. Paul, like Norah, never seems to consider his own imperfections or examines his own contributions to family tensions. In the end, the novel is secular and feminist. The author’s agenda interferes with the story, distorting it so that it becomes difficult to like characters she wants us to like because of their attitude towards David, with whom we sympathize.
To make up for this dissonance between her narrative voice and the reader’s sympathy, Edwards drags the last section out forever as she tries to bring a sense of closure, perhaps secular grace, which she implies comes through Paul’s forgiving his father.
Though I enjoyed the Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by the end I felt frustrated and manipulated, as if I were being forced to ignore one of the great truths of human existence: One person cannot be responsible for every decision others make. We all live with circumstances good and bad, some our own choosing and some not. Yet we are each responsible for the choices we make as we traverse the distance from life to death. No one else can be held responsible for our individual lives.
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