Dissolution

"Have a little faith in your wife, dear. I can be resourceful when I need to be."

Last year, I read Ascension by this author and wasn't too in love with it. I thought I'd give him another try though, and I'm really glad I did. While not perfect, this one was a really enjoyable time travel/memory story, with a really sweet lifelong love story sandwiched in. It reminded me a lot of Blake Crouch's Recursion (which I also really liked), but more thoughtful and less Hollywood action-y.

Maggie's husband Stanley is in a home for memory loss patients, and routine is really the only thing keeping her going as she watches her husband and all their memories fade. What she thought was brought on by old age or disease turns out to be something more sinister, as a strange caller named Hassan reveals to her that Stanley's memories are actively being erased and Maggie is the only one who can maybe stop the whole thing. She reluctantly plays along with Hassan and his lab of strange equipment, and begins diving into Stanley's memories as if she's actually living them alongside him. But the more she delves into his memories ostensibly to save them, the stranger things get, and the less and less she trusts Hassan and his motives.

Okay, so up front, Maggie is a badass old lady. You're going to need to suspend some disbelief here, because she's 83, maybe she works out a ton and doesn't skip yoga. But this really was a fun, thoughtful story about memories, and experiencing a life with someone from another angle. We get two points of view here, Maggie in the...current time, I guess, strapped up to the memory device with Hassan guiding her as a voice in her head, told as an interview of sorts, and Stanley in the...past, I guess, told straight up as a normal story. Things get a little confusing as the story progresses and things start being revealed, but that's essentially the format of the story. I sort of thought the interview format of Maggie's chapters was a bit confusing, especially with what happens later on, but once you get going it's not so bad. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much care the author put into Stanley's and Maggie's relationship together, and how pivotal it ends up being to the story as a whole. I really was invested in seeing these two through their ordeal, and the ending made me feel things.

One of the reasons for the four stars rather than the five stars is the ending. IT'S NOT A BAD ENDING, please don't get me wrong, but (major ending spoilers here) are we to assume then that Stanley is just fucked? Because while Maggie gets to live her never-ending loop of great memories over and over and over again with Hassan/Jacques probably, inevitably, going crazy right there with her, Stanley is wheelchair-bound, locked in his mind, never to be fixed. I assume, anyway, since that's how the book ends. I feel like more needed to be done/said regarding Stanley for that ending to sit right with me. But in broad strokes, I really loved the sentiment that a life between two people lived well is enough for one lady to be willing to keep a memory-eating force and megalomaniac at bay by reliving it over and over and over again, potentially with a crazy man in tow.

Just a book that made me sit back and go, "huh", for many reasons. This one will probably stick with me for a bit.