The Forgetting Time
“Sharon Guskin has burst onto the literary scene like an exploding star . . .”
Without doubt The Forgetting Time is the most enthralling debut novel of the year. Sharon Guskin captures the reader with realistic characters and an intriguing plot that presents reincarnation as at least plausible.
On her 39th birthday Janie has a one-night stand with a stranger named Jeff while on vacation in Trinidad. “Trouble, trouble, trouble, she said to herself as they walked, but his hand was warm in hers and she thought maybe she’d give herself this.”
Later Janie realizes that she didn’t know what Jeff’s last name is, so she cannot tell her son Noah who his father is. “But maybe she had wanted it that way. Maybe she had planned it that way. Because there was no finding Jeff Something from Houston, and it had only bound Noah to her more closely, made him ever more hers.”
Like most mothers, Janie believes that Noah is special, a unique sort of four-year-old that others do not always understand. His nightmares, his aversion to water that makes bath time a nightmare of its own, and his knowledge of the Harry Potter books that she has never read to him, not to mention his remarks about guns, are disturbing to Janie, but she suppresses her uneasiness. Noah is just an imaginative child.
What Janie can’t suppress, what feeds her desperation, is Noah’s constant questioning about his “other mother.” He speaks of his brother Charlie, of a beach house which he loves, and a loving grandfather when he has no grandparents at all. “I want to go home,” he says, and demands to know when his other mother is coming.
When Noah is suspended from his preschool, and the principal subtly threatens to contact Child Services unless Janie consults a child psychologist about Noah’s problems, Janie finally confronts the fact that something is not right with her son.
As Janie struggles to find help for her son, Dr. Jerome Anderson, retired psychiatrist, faces an equally devastating issue. “But I’m not finished.” These are Dr. Anderson’s first words when he receives the diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia, a type of dementia that attacks the brain’s language center.
As the disease progresses Dr. Anderson will lose the ability to read, write, or speak. His world will become a blank, full of sounds that he can no longer decode. For a psychiatrist, a man who loves language, his prognosis is a death sentence. “Is there life after Shakespeare? Now that is a question worth asking.”
His disorder could not have come at a worse time. He struggles to finish a book about his life’s work even though his peers see little value in it. His numerous case studies of children who exhibit memories of previous lives, of consciousness surviving after death, are met with skepticism.
Although his book has a publisher, the editor wants some strong case studies of American children included with those of mostly Asian children. Dr. Anderson despairs of finding any such children. And are his language skills still equal to the task of writing about them?
When Janie contacts Dr. Anderson he is reluctant to see Noah. He explains to Janie that he is not a clinical psychiatrist, but a researcher.
“Janie couldn’t trust him. He was writing a book. She remembered all those books her mother’s friends had given her when she dying, everyone trying to make a buck off the hopeless. . .” But Janie is desperate, and in his own way, so is Dr. Anderson.
As Dr. Anderson questions Noah, the young boy relates more and more memories, exciting the psychiatrist but terrifying Janie. Noah insists that his name is Tommy, and he was shot but also drowned. Janie feels she is losing her son. “I want my mama!” shouts Noah, and Janie feels her heart break.
The Forgetting Time is an eloquent testament to a mother’s love and a man’s commitment to his own conviction that consciousness survives death, and that certain children are born with the memories of that consciousness.
Guskin presents reincarnation against the backdrop of reality: a mother’s love and a mother’s grief. There is none of the fantasy world often found in novels based on reincarnation, so the premise seems more plausible—even to a skeptic.
What also separates The Forgetting Time from other novels based on a similar premise is that Guskin points out that according to case studies done by credible psychiatrists, a child troubled by the memories left over from another life begins to forget at around age six. This theme of forgetting underlies the plot. At some point one must let go of the past and live in the present.
The Forgetting Time is both a mystery and a philosophical novel, and lacks the flaws found in so many debut novels. There are no weak and unbelievable characters; the plot has no holes in its construction; and the portraits of love and grief offset one another in a balanced manner.
Sharon Guskin has burst onto the literary scene like an exploding star, and one doesn’t expect her light to fade very soon.