The Man Without a Shadow

January 11, 2016
A bizarre medical conditionâanterograde amnesiaâis the linchpin holding together Oates's latest novel, a profound and moving meditation on how memory shapes our personalities and, by extension, the emotions that we provoke in others. When neuroscientist Margot Sharpe first meets Elihu Hoopes in 1965 at a neuropsychology lab in Darven Park, Penn., he is a 37-year-old man whose brain has been devastated irreversibly by encephalitis. Although Eli (as everyone calls him) can remember incidents before his illness with great thoroughness, his short-term memories last no longer than 70 seconds. Over the next three decades of scientific study, Margot learns remarkable things about the neurological foundation of memory from Eli, who in his mind is eternally 37 years old. She also falls in love with himâor, at least, the man she thinks he is. Occasionally, Eli is prone to unpredictably violent outbursts that shock Margot, and in a typically edgy fashion, Oates suggests that, in addition to the memories that he can't retain, Eli has memories that he won't reveal. With her usual skill and panache, Oates writes as though she has known her characters all their lives. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins and Associates.

December 1, 2015
Oates explores the lives of an amnesiac and the neuroscientist who studies and adores him. Elihu "Eli" Hoopes, who will be forever known in the annals of science as E.H., loses his short-term memory as a consequence of encephalitis at age 37. The scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, this would-be leftist-turned-stockbroker contracted the fever at the Hoopes' lodge on Lake George. Referred in 1965 to psychologists at the University Neurological Institute, he becomes, in effect, a career guinea pig, subjected daily to various tests by the illustrious Dr. Milton Ferris and his staff, which includes 24-year-old graduate student Margot Sharpe. However avidly he takes notes and makes sketches, Eli can't retain memories of anyone he meets. He greets everyone as if for the first time, with an affable "hel-lo." Where most of his family is concerned, the forgetting is mutual--they have abandoned him to the care of an aunt. Eli ruminates obsessively about his past since his memories of the years before 1965 are intact. Many of his charcoal drawings depict the figure of a drowned girl, around 11 years old, beneath the surface of a stream near Lake George. Eli's italicized thoughts about this girl introduce a murder mystery: his cousin Gretchen disappeared one summer, and the Hoopeses hushed it up. Is Eli the killer? As Margot ages and advances in academia, her private life becomes increasingly fraught--she has an affair with Ferris, a married womanizer, and allows him to pillage her ideas but refuses to expose him--and then she begins an affair with Eli. Oates excels at creating spooky, off-kilter atmospherics, less so at funneling scientific data onto the page in digestible chunks. The maze of memory is an ideal setting for Oates' trademark mixture of melodrama and pathos.

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Starred review from December 15, 2015
Margo Sharpe is an anxiously ambitious graduate student in a cutting-edge neuropsychology lab, in 1965, when she first encounters Elihu Hoopes. The scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, Eli is tall, tailored, and charming, which camouflages his severe mental limitations until one speaks with him for 70 seconds. Eli can crisply recall the first 37 years of his life, but after a viral infection savaged his brain while he was camping alone in the Adirondacks, he is unable to form new memories. Smart, cultured, and congenial, he is the ideal neuroscience research subject, and Margo, high-strung and obsessive, becomes fascinated with Eli to the point of wildly unethical fanaticism. She becomes famous for the results of the grueling experiments she puts Eli through, while he, haunted by a secret childhood tragedy, grows increasingly angry and volatile. Masterful in her articulation of distressed psyches and intimate predator-prey relationships, Oates (The Sacrifice, 2015) is in her element in the world of neuroscience, drawing on ardent research and her gothic imagination and deploying her eerie, incantatory style to dramatize the torment of mental impairmentEli's amnesia and Margo's monomaniaas well as the wonder and ruthlessness of science. This complexly suspenseful and darkly erotic duel between a lovesick mad scientist and her beleaguered yet far from helpless subject illuminates, with strobe-light intensity, the labyrinthine mysteries of our brains and minds. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Oates' latest daring novel is charged with the excitement of a scientific thriller and can be recommended to Oates devotees and all readers seeking smart and unnerving page-turners.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)