'Find Me' Finds Balance Between Memory and Illusion

Joy, an enigmatic young woman brooding in the confines of a futuristic New England hospital ward, asks variations of the same angst-ridden question over and over: “Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?” Identity is constituted in large part by memories, but as the protagonist of Laura Van Den Berg’s riveting debut novel, “Find Me,” Joy is troubled by memories that she cannot fully piece together. Most of these are random fragments from her moves between foster parents: art museum security guards, a dental office receptionist with gold toenails who wears a pink tracksuit, group homes. Van Den Berg’s fierce depiction of Joy’s struggle to understand the mystery of her blurry past is effectively captured through her clever manipulation of readers and the subtle dystopia of Joy’s internal world, which ultimately makes for a surprisingly relatable story.

The context in which Joy’s personal psychological drama plays out is also one of mental uncertainty. Joy lives in an apocalyptic society plagued by a lethal disease that causes extreme memory loss and eventual death: “Autopsies showed prions eating through brain tissue, leading to sudden neurological collapse, but once they got everything under the microscopes, they realized it was something different, something new. We were awash in theories—biological attack, apocalypse, environmental meltdown—and no solutions. Our brains, our greatest human asset, were disintegrating.” Joy, who claims to be immune to the disease, is serving as a case study in a hospital with other patients. But her narrative itself soon begins to disintegrate.

Perhaps the most exciting feature of the story is Joy’s unexpected betrayal of the readers’ trust, which is established in Van Den Berg’s deceptively simple and straightforward style in creating Joy’s voice. Because the book is told from Joy’s perspective and because there are very few other characters—the others either die of an illness, or they are people like the doctor who serve as a means for conveying information—it’s easy to gain a false sense of trust in the narrator and the story she is telling. For example, when telling a dream of her mom, Joy goes into great detail: “She is faceless, but I know it’s her. We are both staring into the glass. There’s a gold coin in the bottom. We want to get it out, but don’t know how.” These succinct, Hemingway-esque statements risk becoming off-putting for the reader, who may feel they are just factual. However, it later becomes apparent that there is a reason for this seemingly annoying stylistic choice. One day Joy exclaims, “In the hallway a patient screams and it takes me a second to realize the screaming person is me.” Suddenly Joy doesn’t seem so reliable. The distance between the memories she claims to be recording and her mental state only grows larger.

Joy’s unreliability is captivating, but at times Van Den Berg could have presented it more effectively. The novel begins with scenes of Joy in the hospital, yet the story is structured so that flashbacks of Joy’s life before the hospital are sprinkled throughout. Through these flashbacks, the reader comes to understand the magnitude and depth of Joy’s loneliness. At times the structure of the story is hard to follow because, as the novel continues, it becomes increasingly difficult to decipher which plot line is the life she is living and which ones are comprised of flashbacks. Additionally, nearly every section and chapter ends with a quotable piece of insight; at first it is poetic, but after some time, Van Den Berg seems to be over-relying on these pieces of wisdom to keep the reader’s interest anchored and the suspense high. Joy frequently says things like, “I wonder if anyone is watching. If anyone will ever tell my story. If anyone will remember.” This feels overdone, as if Van Den Berg is hiding Joy behind quotes instead of explaining the situation at hand, and it becomes quite confusing.

But it is that feeling of confusion, the ever-shifting questions implanted in the minds of readers as the novel unfolds, that brings the story to life. Though the novel’s setting is dystopian, it’s easy to identify with the characters because of the common traits and suffering in the novel—specifically the plague of loneliness, the craving for purpose, and the desire to be more than an anonymous and invisible individual. Most importantly, Van Den Berg emphasizes the way we perceive our own lives—can we trust our own memory? What truly sets this dystopian novel apart, then, is the realization that this dystopia is completely plausible and possible. The disease, though its cause is not certain, is often referred to as one caused completely by the mind—and one that could potentially be cured by the mind.

Despite the wild and positively confusing ride the reader is in for when reading this novel, Van Den Berg has successfully shaped this story into one that emphasizes the unique powers of the mind. “Find Me”’s hauntingly beautiful dystopia promises to overturn assumptions about the truth of memory and perception in reading.

—Staff writer Annie E. Schugart can be reached at annie.schugart@thecrimson.com.