You Lost Me There

Jul 23, 2010 Seán rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, first-reads

You Lost Me There is the debut novel of the co-founder of The Morning News, and there probably is no bigger fan of the site than this reader. (Briefly, for the uninformed, TMN is the site that launched the Gary Benchley web series, the more-hit-than-miss Non-Expert column, and the Tournament of Books, the N-C-Two-As for booknerds. This is a more than fine pedigree for a freshman novelist in the internetty age.)

And Baldwin can certainly write well and engagingly, even the worst moments in YLMT ar...more You Lost Me There is the debut novel of the co-founder of The Morning News, and there probably is no bigger fan of the site than this reader. (Briefly, for the uninformed, TMN is the site that launched the Gary Benchley web series, the more-hit-than-miss Non-Expert column, and the Tournament of Books, the N-C-Two-As for booknerds. This is a more than fine pedigree for a freshman novelist in the internetty age.)

And Baldwin can certainly write well and engagingly, even the worst moments in YLMT are suffused by the light of the guy's obvious talent. Victor, a dedicated genetic researcher/laboratory salaryman, stands at the center of the book. Vic's area of expertise is Alzheimer's and it's in his work to seduce and tame the disease that offers Baldwin plenty opportunity to muse on the nature of time, memory, and that most unstable of elements, lurve.

Yet, what one finds in YLMT is that most common of writerman problems: characters in search of a story. While God knows this reader is no strict formalist, there is a science to narrative construction. When fashioned with a greedy beaux-arts eye (the gleaming marble balustrade minus one carefully chosen baluster) or the slashing cursor of an ego-pig deconstructivist (DJ CAD Jockey's Bauhaus Fractal Remix), structure can be more than style or evidence of closed-off neural pathways, it can be the very wordstuff of the author's voice, the very thing that by its girdings transmits the fluttering light of inspiration that set pen to paper.

Inbetweensy fits of subway car narcolepsy, I'm reading Roa Bastos' I, the Supreme (the original Spanish title, "Yo el Supremo," is a life-giving mantra when shouted at 4 a.m. on Roosevelt Avenue). The book is proving to be one of the most ballsy fuck-yous to the ideas of character and plot ever dreamt up by the Dalkey Archive. Bastos has something sincerious going on, however; one voice by turns shouting and sputtering for 400 pages is all that's needed. Baldwin just simply ain't there.

In YLMT, Victor's wife's notecards (the wife is dead, by the way, and the notes written for aborted couples therapy) are a classic use of the epistolary voice, an 18th Century hold-over device that continues to pay off from Dear Mr. Henshaw to Ada-ville. Here though, they are not enough. They don't bracket parts of a story; rather, they serve as (well-executed, mind you) timeouts. Again, you like the elements, moments, and phrases very much. But then you have Vic's diversionary loves, a slow-motion chaos of unfurling grief that strikes the right note here and there, but then prematurely runs out of breath. Whereupon, a heretofore second-string character is tagged in for an unsatisfying conclusion.

Perhaps in a different time, last year or a fortnight from now, I would be all about Baldwin's first foray. But these days? Kiss it up, I know. But really though, every day, every day I abandon the el-shrouded lee of my Queens and trek to a small room in Brooklyn to proofread reams and reams of shyster deposition transcripts, where I am beset by Staten Island's most feared temp-trolls, and most days I read only in quick snatches on crowded, post-budget cut trains, and then you'll find me working off-the-books after close-of-business. In library stacks Westlaw used to be a friend of mine. These days, you got to grab me, son.

****

Note: An earlier review was lost to (1) Tecate; and (2) GR's lack of an auto-save feature. This present review is offered to you by Tecate by its damned self. Three-fourths of the previous review focused on how well Baldwin rendered the setting of YLMT, the Downeast Coast of Maine. It was all an elaborate set-up for this: this past Fourth of July, I spent a weekend on an island in Casco Bay, Maine where George and Babs Bush took in a fancypants restaurant's luncheon, a likely low-salt repast which coincided with my noontime arrival on that very same spit o' land. At that moment, I was less than a mile from the molten, sulphurous core of whiteness and the scenery couldn't have been lovelier.(less)

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Jul 21, 2010 Christina Zawadiwsky rated it 4 of 5 stars

You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin

This is a book about memory (and its individuation), but it begins, in the prologue, with secrets. When they are getting to know each other, husband and wife Victor and Sarah tell each other their deepest secrets – he, that he had killed someone – that is, a friend of his killed himself and Victor felt he should have stopped him – and she, that she may have punched her mother in the stomach (at which they both laugh, given her mother’s obnoxiousness). Dr. Vi...more You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin

This is a book about memory (and its individuation), but it begins, in the prologue, with secrets. When they are getting to know each other, husband and wife Victor and Sarah tell each other their deepest secrets – he, that he had killed someone – that is, a friend of his killed himself and Victor felt he should have stopped him – and she, that she may have punched her mother in the stomach (at which they both laugh, given her mother’s obnoxiousness). Dr. Victor Aaron, a distinguished Altzheimer’s research specialist, recalls this incident only through some note cards he discovered on which his now deceased wife Sarah wrote about turning points in their marriage, and he writes “Some theories said the most accurate memory was one that’s never recalled. The more the mind retells a story, the more that story hardens into a basic shape, where by remembering one detail we push four others below the surface, and construct the memory touch-by-touch.” But in reading Sarah’s account he remembers that everything she wrote was absolutely accurate, and of course, memory is very important once a loved one has died.

Victor goes on to quote Sherlock Holmes, “A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.” This novel made me think about how we would ever really know the texture of another person’s thoughts, or even what they’re thinking, since many times in my life I’ve been shocked by the thoughts of others, upon their vocalization. Working through his grief, Victor begins to remember certain incidents involving Sarah, who was a performance artist and whose play made it to Broadway, not to mention getting known for a small film that she did that became a cult classic. But as he remembers he wonders why his mind brings him to certain events and not to others (while she has recalled, importantly, incidents he has not deemed important, in her writing), and I too have often wondered Why? about a memory that wasn’t particularly jubilant or traumatic, just there as a gift from the brain.

You Lost Me There is a first novel that is very full – characters have lots of details attached to them (e.g. about Victor’s new love, Regina, and his beloved Aunt Betsy, also a widow), making them very singular and making our reading experience energetic. He paints beautiful word-images for us to envision about these characters, his work, and the landscape in which he lives.

About his demanding work Victor writes, “Science was marriage: once the sizzle failed, there needed to be a long-standing love for the discipline to keep you going. Those who worked in academic research for ego fulfillment didn’t last.” As an intense aspect of Victor’s life, perhaps one to which he gave the majority of his hours, scientific research is compared to the opposite of Eureka (which I take to mean, “I have lost it,” or, better yet, “I haven’t found it!”).

Baldwin bounces back and forth from the triangle of his life (his girlfriend Regina and his Aunt Betsy, his memories of his wife, who died suddenly in a car accident, and his scientific research work) with aplomb, but he still seems trapped in the triangle. However, there are many ways in which to live, and who’s to say that this limited way isn’t valid? Spending so much time with his work seems worth it, to Victor, in the end, as “Those true moments of scientific pleasure, when you’e working on an experiment and, at two in the morning, blasting Dylan, you realize that you’ve hit on something, that the experiment’s a success, and it dawns on you that because no one has ever posed this question in quite the same way, you now know something that no one has known before – that’s when the blood’s pumping, and all the hours, all the sacrifices, assume a much larger value.”

You Lost Me There is highly believable, and also pleasurable to read, a keyhole peek into the life of “an expert at our mechanisms at retaining information.” Finally a book based less on plot advancement than on everyday emotions and observations! “You disarm my trust,” Sarah tells Victor, and as an author, Rosencrans Baldwin has disarmed ours, leaving us totally engaged.

You Lost Me There by Rosencrans Baldwin, on sale on August 12, 2010 by Riverhead Books (a division of Penguin Books), 304 pages.

Reviewed by Christina Zawadiwsky

Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian-American, born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, and is a poet, artist, journalist and TV producer. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Award, two Wisconsin Arts Boards Awards, a Co-Ordinating Council of Literary Magazines Writers Award, and an Art Futures Award, among other honors. She was the originator and producer of Where The Waters Meet, a local TV series created to facilitate the voices of artists of all genres in the media, for which she won two national and twenty local awards, including a Commitment to Community Television Award. She is also a contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology, the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, and has published four books of poetry. She currently reviews movies for http://www.movieroomreviews.com, music for http://www.musicroomreviews.com, and books for http://www.bookroomreviews.com.
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Jun 25, 2012 Elaine rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

This book was just too much of a painful slog. I don't know who or what rang most false: the spry drunken 86 year old, the vapid invisible 58 year protagonist, the weirdly talkative and aggressive 20 something girls who have nothing better to do than hang around the aforementioned protagonist, the stilted and improbable dialogue, the trite musings on science and memory... The whole book seemed to violently violate the old adage of write what you know, which fine, many talented writers can violat...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Kathleen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: authors-new-to-me

Over thirty years into his research into Alzheimer’s disease and four years after his wife’s sudden death, Victor, internationally acclaimed neuroscientist struggles with memories…”The more you recall something, the more false it becomes…” His own words haunt him, baffled by human emotions, as he is forced to think about his long marriage when he discovers his wife’s notes about directional changes in their marriage, a therapist’s assignment to both of them. “If two people have the same experien...more

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Aug 18, 2012 Kerfe rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

The reviews made this book sound appealing, and the idea--that people, even in close relationships, can have vastly different memories and perceptions of the same shared experiences--still feels like a good one. But Baldwin's execution, even though it included occasional flashes of insight, was not really that interesting.

The characters--scientist out of touch with his emotions, unfulfilled unhappy creative wife, ditsy eccentric aunt, philandering friend, anxious 40's single career woman, snarky...more

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Jun 23, 2012 Kate rated it 1 of 5 stars

I like the idea of this book. I like the idea of a book about memory, how two people's memories of the same events can be completely different, and how that can color their lives together. There wasn't enough of that in this book. However, this book has plenty of two dimensional women. Ugh. I hate books where the author has no idea how to write female characters. I also didn't like the protagonist much, so that didn't help me feel invested in this book. I think that maybe Baldwin was trying to s...more

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Sep 18, 2011 Becky rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: for-fun

A scientific researcher loses his wife in a car crash. She leaves behind five written exercises from her therapy sessions, describing five turning points in their relationship. The man tries to come to terms with the loss of his wife, by visiting her elderly aunt, starting a sexual relationship with a burlesque-dancing graduate student, and by allowing his bohemian god-daughter to move into his house to follow her dreams of being a chef.

How will this handful of zany women help him come to terms...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Claire rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

http://www.tkreviews.org/#/you-lost-m...

As far as scientists have come in terms of medical breakthroughs in treating neurological disorders and depression, the interworkings of the brain and the way that humans create memories still, to a certain degree, remain mysteries. In his debut novel You Lost Me There(Riverhead, $25.95), Rosecrans Baldwin attempts to explore the subjective aspects of memory and the emotional bond of marriage from the point of view of an Alzheimer’s disease researcher.

Alth...more http://www.tkreviews.org/#/you-lost-m...

As far as scientists have come in terms of medical breakthroughs in treating neurological disorders and depression, the interworkings of the brain and the way that humans create memories still, to a certain degree, remain mysteries. In his debut novel You Lost Me There (Riverhead, $25.95), Rosecrans Baldwin attempts to explore the subjective aspects of memory and the emotional bond of marriage from the point of view of an Alzheimer’s disease researcher.

Although the premise sounds promising, the execution is unfocused and uninspiring. Victor Aaron is a renowned geneticist whose lab off the coast of Maine is “trying to develop neuroprotective strategies for sufferers, aiming to help their neurons fight back against or even prevent the disease.” His wife of thirty-three years, Sara, was killed in a car accident several years earlier, and he has since started dating Regina, a.k.a. La Loulou, a twenty-five-year-old burlesque dancer and Ph. D. student who says “Whatever” and “WTF” a lot and calls our protagonist Chéri. With many emotional problems, among them impotence, Victor spirals into a neurotic depression, exacerbated by his discovery of notes Sara wrote on index cards, which are critical of their marriage.

Even with his sophisticated understanding of the brain and how one can combat its degeneration, Victor was unable to fight back against the malaise affecting his marriage. Sara’s notes mention that he was a poor listener and a workaholic who didn’t appreciate her writing talent (she was a successful playwright). Whatever the cause of their discord, the novel doesn’t offer enough complexity or insight to draw readers into the ennui of Victor and Sara’s marital turbulence. One scene at the end of the novel is especially annoying: Victor’s boss, a crotchety old man nicknamed “Toad,” tells Sara that he doesn’t like her hit play, and that she probably got lucky that it took off. Sara is outraged, and Toad tells her “not to get hysterical.” This episode is so distressing to Sara that she decides to leave Victor abruptly and go to Los Angeles for six months. Really? Is she so insecure that one negative comment from her husband’s elderly co-worker can make her walk out on her marriage?

Unfortunately, the backward glance at Sara and Victor’s marriage is by far the most interesting part of the novel. The other characters and their actions are bizarre, petty, and roughly sketched. Victor’s best friend Russell (who Victor briefly and suddenly accuses of having an affair with Sara) sends his young, blonde, dreadlocked daughter Cornelia to live with Victor in Maine because she wants to be a chef and work in a local restaurant, run by Sara’s addict cousin Joel. Not only do she and Victor maintain a sexual tension that is inappropriate and uncomfortable to witness (“Cornelia leaned over at one point and wiped her fingers on my khakis. Our hands were covered in lobster”), but Cornelia, as described by Baldwin, is also a parody of today’s teens who likes to “instant message outside while web-surfing while e-mailing while watching a DVD of some TV show she liked okay.” A possible exception to these unlikeable characters is Sara’s eccentric and feisty Aunt Betsy, who Victor took out on dinner dates every Friday until her death.

In You Lost Me There, more character-focused than plot-driven, Baldwin incorporates interior thought-associations and snippets of dialogue in a way that makes the writing seem inconsistent and abrupt. This may have been an attempt to mimic the thought process of memories, but I found myself getting caught in sentences like this: “This misconception that humans were so many toggles was to my mind the new phrenology, and scientists themselves were responsible for bad marketing and spreading rumors, attempting to explain our mysteries with little data.”

But what was really baffling were the strange, superfluous elements and threads interspersed in the narrative. Bruce Willis inexplicably shows up throughout the novel—in Victor’s dreams, in Sara’s sexual fantasies, as an example of someone with a nice haircut, in the form of a cardboard cutout, and in real life at a party. It is possible that we are meant to suspect that Bruce Willis had an affair with Sara because they worked together on a screenplay, but this was not entirely clear. Another seemingly symbolic device, deer antlers, are smashed through the window of Victor’s car, and he later places them near Cordelia and her boyfriend Dan when they are sleeping together. Even after tracing each mention of Bruce Willis or the antlers, it is still difficult to understand their significance.

But maybe that’s the point. Victor asks, “If two people have the same experience, but remember it differently, what does it say about their respective minds?” Others reading this novel might interpret it and remember it differently than I do. Victor muses about the the way in which anecdotes become memories, and memories are subjective and susceptible to change: "Some theories said the most accurate memory was one that's never recalled. The more the mind retells a story, the more that story hardens into a basic shape, where by remembering one detail we push ten others below the surface and construct the memory touch by touch. A sculpture between the neurons that looks like its model, just not completely."

These moments of observation, when Victor applies his scientific knowledge of the brain to relationships, create an interesting study of the intersection between empirical facts and personal emotion. Victor can’t help but analyze love—on the one hand he acknowledges that marriage isn’t a science, but then later says that he decided to marry Sara after “working it out on paper.” Victor, the consummate scientist, explains: “Decisions have multiple origins, neurologically. If we only used our brain’s rational side, we’d analyze without stopping, dissect our options into ever smaller pieces, and follow out their logical impulse that we’d forget why we began. Without our emotional voices, without the gut, without sentimental gales and whatever mute instinct governed (or not so mute considering the loudness of hunger, a sex drive’s roaring static), there’s only be dithering.” With all of the emotional baggage unpacked in You Lost Me There, the book could have benefited from a more logical plot structure, clear and rational connections, and much less dithering.(less)

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Feb 22, 2011 switterbug (Betsey) rated it 3 of 5 stars

In the isolated Soborg Institute off the coast of Maine, obsessive geneticist Victor Aaron works tirelessly to make a breakthrough in Alzheimer's research with his capable, motley crew of colleagues. Since his wife, Sara, died several years ago, he has walled himself off emotionally from relationships, frustrating his twenty-five year-old girlfriend, Regina, a research fellow and budding poet. He is fifty-eight and suffering from impotence. She is a potent, burlesque-loving young woman that danc...more In the isolated Soborg Institute off the coast of Maine, obsessive geneticist Victor Aaron works tirelessly to make a breakthrough in Alzheimer's research with his capable, motley crew of colleagues. Since his wife, Sara, died several years ago, he has walled himself off emotionally from relationships, frustrating his twenty-five year-old girlfriend, Regina, a research fellow and budding poet. He is fifty-eight and suffering from impotence. She is a potent, burlesque-loving young woman that dances naked for him on their routine weekly rendezvous. They keep a regular regimen of Fridays and a secret email exchange at work.

Victor's links to his dead wife include a series of index cards that she left behind, detailing the various vectors of their thirty-odd year marriage, and her octogenarian Aunt Betsy, the bellicose island doyenne. He pencils in a regular Friday supper with Aunt Betsy following his Friday afternoon failures with Regina. He compartmentalizes his relationships and quarantines his heart, wallowing in melancholy over his loss. The troubled arc of his marriage left a wake of unsettled issues that Victor is trying to stitch together from their memories. Sara's index cards tell a story that threatens to unhinge him completely.

The novel contains some elaborate observations on life, particularly memories.
"Some theories said the most accurate memory was one that's never recalled. The more the mind retells a story, the more that story hardens into a basic shape, where by remembering one detail we push ten others below the surface and construct the memory touch by touch. A sculpture between the neurons that looks like its model, just not completely."

As a philosophical writer of tart reflections, Baldwin has a pungent flair. However, the story was often fuzzy and unfocused, as it lurched from character to character, from scene to scene. Likewise, this eccentric cast of oddballs was self-consciously overplayed. They were a little too quirky and frenzied, as if the author was trying to fill a weak story with ambient noise. The narrative felt boggy and bleary, and I was routinely impatient to return to the examination of Victor and Sara's marriage. The book needs some crisp editing; the story tends to become either repetitive and muddy or windy and discursive. Also, a dark and defining event in Victor's past was too affectedly reminiscent of a scene out of Pump up the Volume.

The narrative thrust declines when Aunt Betsy's son, Joel, a background character during most of the story, is corralled to front and center during the final stretch of the novel. Once the climax is reached--an over-the-top but ultimately enervating experience--the story continues tonelessly with Joel and his transgressions. He was the least engaging character of all, presented wearily as the stock alcoholic. The story's indulgence into Joel became tedious to read, and I often lost interest.

Baldwin's freshman effort does show promising talent, but it suffers from the flaws of many debut novels. The jacket cover describes this book as "dazzling." Honestly, dazzling it is not. It lacks focus and rhythm and suffers from structural jam and story caulking. But I admire Baldwin's offbeat wisdom and and I suspect he will refine his craft with time.
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Feb 13, 2011 Greg Zimmerman rated it 2 of 5 stars

The set-up for Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel, You Lost Me There, is certainly intriguing. An Alzheimer researcher wrestles with his own rememories. But his problem is not that he's losing his memory. It's that he can't remember things accurately or definitively or with the same assignation of value as others. And this causes him quite a bit of consternation. Indeed, it nearly ruins his life.

Dr. Victor Aaron's wife Sara has been dead for several years -- perishing in a car crash soon after a re...more The set-up for Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel, You Lost Me There, is certainly intriguing. An Alzheimer researcher wrestles with his own rememories. But his problem is not that he's losing his memory. It's that he can't remember things accurately or definitively or with the same assignation of value as others. And this causes him quite a bit of consternation. Indeed, it nearly ruins his life.

Dr. Victor Aaron's wife Sara has been dead for several years -- perishing in a car crash soon after a reconciliation of their rocky marriage. To cope, Victor has lost himself in his research on a small island off the coast of Maine. When he finds some notecards Sara had written in therapy during a rough patch in their marriage, he's astounded to learn that what she had considered the signature events of their marriage, he can barely remember at all. "If two people have the same experience, but remember it differently, what does that say about their respective minds?" Victor wonders.

That's an easy one, isn't it? The answer is that respective minds are simply different; they see and experience the world differently. Not exactly earth-shattering, is it? But that's the idea Baldwin dwells on for the whole of the novel, and so, to me, the story didn't live up to the intrigue of its original set-up. Besides that reason, the novel fell a bit flat because Victor is such a dunderhead. He's humorless. He's a bore. And he's totally oblivious. Not good qualities for a protagonist, in my view. Furthermore, this novel finally made me understand the book reviewer cliche word "uneven." To emphasize the idea of the inconsistency of memories, Baldwin constantly jumps back and forth in his character's lives, often from paragraph to paragraph, between memories and real-time. The effect is that you're constantly a bit off balance trying to place the memories in some sort of chronology to construct a bigger picture of these characters' lives. Some clunky dialogue (Victor, confused, always asks "What are you talking about?") and some first-novel glitches (how does an early-20s girl who only brings a purple backpack for a summer stay suddenly have an evening gown and high heels?) also add to the sense of unevenness.

Finally, though, as Victor begins to slowly yank himself out of his malaise, helped along by some rather strange circumstances (a dream-like conversation with his dead wife, i.e.), the novel does gain some momentum and becomes a bit more fun. There are some very well-rendered and affecting final scenes which don't altogether save the novel, but do show Baldwin's promise as a writer.

To sum up what I consider to be about a three-star novel, it'd be really easy to make a joke like "No, Mr. Baldwin, you actually lost ME there," but I won't. (even though I just did...Did you laugh? No? Damn.) This definitely wasn't my favorite book ever, but I'd say if you're interested in getting in on the ground floor of a writer from whom you'll surely hear, I'd recommend You Lost Me There for that reason. (less)

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Jan 21, 2011 Jeff rated it 4 of 5 stars

Baldwin’s debut is an engrossing, beautiful, tragicomic novel that is as thought-provoking as it is readable. At turns funny and heartbreaking, “You Lost Me There” tells the story of Dr. Victor Aaron, an aging neuroscientist who is studying Alzheimer’s at a remote Northeastern institute. Bereft of his wife, who died in car accident, he finds a series of note cards that she has written as part of a single marriage counseling session they attended together. As Victor reads the cards and navigates...more

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Nov 18, 2010 christa rated it 3 of 5 stars

My very special gentleman friend has this thing with the last third of movies and books. Usually he hates them. Probably would rather have the ending lopped off, than nose dive into a suck pool. Especially in the situation of a really, really, really good first two-thirds.

I had that in mind as I neared the ending of Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel "You Lost Me There." I considered closing the book. Sealing it. Shelving it. Letting the story end where I wanted to end, instead of where Baldwin wan...more My very special gentleman friend has this thing with the last third of movies and books. Usually he hates them. Probably would rather have the ending lopped off, than nose dive into a suck pool. Especially in the situation of a really, really, really good first two-thirds.

I had that in mind as I neared the ending of Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel "You Lost Me There." I considered closing the book. Sealing it. Shelving it. Letting the story end where I wanted to end, instead of where Baldwin wanted it to end. I wasn't convinced that he had it in him to maintain the loveliness of the book to the final page. And by dammit, I was right. Spoiler alert: Fizzle-fest.

This post was supposed to be a love letter to those books that come around, and everything in the universe is working in unison, and suddenly you have the hots for a collection of words but no idea why. This one has got a strong science plot line, that includes actual science words. It's not an addiction memoir, or Japanese horror. The words won't lull you into a dreamy Murakami coma. It's just really good. A pleasant place to live for eight hours. Or should I say, the six-ish or so hours before the story just dissolved. Such a shame. A damn, damn shame.

Dr. Victor Aaron, a pretty decent scientist researching Alzheimer's Disease, is a worker bee whose wife, Sara, died a few years ago in a car accident. Things were a little blotchy in their relationship at the time. She was a playwright slash screenwriter with a solid flick on her resume. There was a trial separation, and also a trip to a couples therapist, who assigned a writing project: List the five benchmarks for where this relationship took a turn.

Victor disses the assignment, balks at psychiatry, but later finds her cards which reveal that her memories of their marriage deviate from his own. Confusing times for a biggie in the brain world, who specializes in memories. In the meantime, he's got a handful of ladies in his life, and he isn't pulling his weight in any of these relationships. There is a sassafrass young lady who spends Friday evenings performing burlesque shows for his personal viewing, and a gossip-y, smoking, drinking old bitty he eats dinner with on Friday nights. His lab parter is flailing around with big questions about love. And, later, his goddaughter moves in for the summer.

But, dude. He's coasting. Doesn't realize that the young burlesque dancer is developing real feelings for him, and he is accused of being inconsiderate by the old dinner partner. Poor lab partner is frustrated; He embarrasses the hell out of the goddaughter, a sort of confusing character who seems inches from leaning Lolita.

And those darn notecards are haunting him.

Victor is a toughie. His motivations, or lack thereof, are frustrating. But Baldwin has mastered the art of the supporting role: Everyone around him is a real pleasure. These two components work really well together.

But there isn't a climax, which is interesting because Victor himself can't finish. So unfortunate, since there are so many nice thoughts on love and loss and memory and relationships.

If I had it to do again, I'd have followed my instincts with this one and ditched out on the book toward the end, before it ditched out on me. (less)

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Mar 16, 2012 Hikachi rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature, love-story

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Aug 22, 2012 Ed rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2-and-a-half-stars, 2012, debut-novel, read-on-kindle

I had been meaning to get to Rosecrans Baldwin's You Lost Me There for awhile now. Instead a year+ passed and I just ended up reading his American in Paris memoir Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down... which, in small part, spoke of writing this novel. While I wasn't bowled over by Baldwin's Paris, I thought it would be an interesting literary segue to finally go back and read this debut novel.

But while the premise is promising, a doctor researching Alzheimer's struggles with his own m...more

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Jun 02, 2012 Lee Razer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

I definitely wanted to like it more than I did. The written dialogue is frequently clunky, almost as if rather than holding a conversation the characters are just throwing words at each other. Maybe that's reflective of Victor's malaise and difficulty relating to other people but it made for a sometimes irksome reading experience.

Cornelia, the young dreadlocked liberated vegan hippy and live-in goddaughter, I thought was a largely unnecessary and weak character. Her provacative presence in his...more

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Aug 11, 2010 Amy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: arcs-or-review-copy

Bruce Willis. Die Hard. "Moonlighting"

How often do you run into Mr. Willis and his oeuvre in literary fiction? He may not appear frequently (maybe not at all) yet he fits in perfectly with this substantial and insightful novel about memor by Rosecrans Baldwin. You Lost Me There is a complicated story, with twists and surprises and feinted paths, as well as scientific details about disease and the research to fight it. Beyond the serious details, it is a fun novel as well, thus Bruce Willis refer...more Bruce Willis. Die Hard. "Moonlighting"

How often do you run into Mr. Willis and his oeuvre in literary fiction? He may not appear frequently (maybe not at all) yet he fits in perfectly with this substantial and insightful novel about memor by Rosecrans Baldwin. You Lost Me There is a complicated story, with twists and surprises and feinted paths, as well as scientific details about disease and the research to fight it. Beyond the serious details, it is a fun novel as well, thus Bruce Willis references prevail throughout the story and with surprising relevancy.

“Years in the past, someone thought my wife was a knockout, one night long ago in a restaurant. A night I didn’t remember.”

So realizes Victor Aaron, a brilliant scientist who is now realizing just how ignorant he’s been. In the time since his wife’s fatal car accident, he’s been lost and unable to find his way, too young to retire but too old to feel any real enthusiasm for his life or work. As a scientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, he’s enthralled with the concept of memory and works to find a cure. His work gives him opportunities to study case histories on how the brain is wired, and the novel doesn’t hesitate to dip into scientific explanations. That the memory specialist is unable to recall much about his wife, anything accurate, is a puzzle he needs to solve.

He stumbles upon note cards that his wife had written, as suggested by a marriage counselor they had hired, in an effort to stall what appeared to be an inevitable divorce. Their marriage had become a quiet battle of pathos versus logos, with a bit of ethos thrown in by crazy Aunt Betsy. Aunt Betsy appears to be the voice of balance in the novel, even though she is described by Victor as “an amateur anthropologist… [who:] studied misbehavior. She tracked her stories doggedly and did not hesitate to use them.”

Victor is most astonished by how his wife Sara describes him in her note cards: “He was so focused on research and making a name for himself that we were landlocked by his lab schedule, him at sea and me in the window.” She had a successful career, as did he, they were wealthy, and he didn’t see a problem in their marriage that couldn’t be fixed without him simply apologizing. That his apologies were vague and noncommittal didn’t occur to him, and as he continues to read her notes he realizes how differently he and she had interpreted significant events in their lives.

However, the story doesn’t limit itself to their marital discord, which would probably be a really sappy novel that would ultimately be a bore, and then a television movie. Instead, Baldwin goes deeper into what memories Victor has, from a childhood friend’s suicide to his closest friend’s obvious creepiness. It’s as if seeing his wife Sara’s version of himself has freed him to reexamine himself from other angles. Yet you can’t be lulled into thinking this is a fable that ends with everyone awakened to their flaws and eager to change. Can you change who you are if you can't remember what you've been?

“I didn’t want to remember that evening ever again. Wipe the synapses clean with some scotch and a hard sleep.”

Baldwin creates a thriller-like pace, and he weaves in details such as the “We Will Never Forget” bumper stickers of 9/11, and how in placing them on cars, people are essentially admitting that they need to be reminded. Victor admits to not remembering the name of a movie that was the centerpiece of their first date, and Baldwin uses this to contrast how there are often so many little things we remember while the more important details slip away. Even more fascinating, though, is how Baldwin portrays different characters in the phases of wanting to remember or trying to forget.

Because this doesn’t attempt to sew up all the details neatly, it would probably be a great film. I’d bet the movie rights are already sold. The question is, is there a role for Bruce Willis?
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Mar 24, 2013 Allison rated it 2 of 5 stars

Victor Adams is a sixty-year-old neuroscientist putting in long days at his lab, studying Alzheimer's. He's been working long hours his entire career, which caused him to miss out on much of his marriage. His wife, Sara, has died in a car crash some time ago, but Victor hasn't properly grieved. When he finds notecards Sara had written as a therapy assignment, his marriage is cast in a different light. He remembered things one way, but Sara has a drastically different point of view. Coming to ter...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Larry Hoffer added it

First of all, how friggin' cool is the name Rosecrans Baldwin? Definitely begs for some notoriety, don't you think? Well, after reading this tremendously affecting book, I have little doubt Baldwin is on the fame track.

Victor Aaron is a fairly well-known Alzheimer's researcher running a university lab in Maine. He is struggling with the recent death of his screenwriter wife, Sara, with whom he had only recently gotten back together after an estrangement. One sleepless night he finds a stack of...more

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Dec 30, 2011 Neil rated it 3 of 5 stars

As is the case for so many individual people, this book's strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. I enjoyed that although the book starts out with a main character who is an Alzheimer's researcher and who is forced to face the considerable gaps between his own memories and those of his dead wife, the novel never lets itself be reduced to--or even focused on--memory. Instead, it ranges wildly across creativity in Hollywood, off-off-Broadway, in the kitchen, in poems; swimming; li...more

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Feb 21, 2011 Jon rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

I'm a little conflicted about You Lost Me There. It's a well-written novel examining relationships over time and to some degree the way death does and does not effect them. I really enjoyed the way the characters were developed and interwoven, but at the end of the day I felt that there was too little payoff for my investment.

Minor spoiler alert, I guess, but I felt that there was great potential for a quietly cataclysmic, spirit-crushing end in keeping with running themes of the book. I was a l...more

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Jul 18, 2010 Alicia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

A solid first novel by Rosecrans Baldwin. Was it my favorite book ever? No.. but I found it thoroughly enjoyable. The strange thing is though, I found myself more drawn to side characters. Sara in particular, I thought was very intriguing and was perhaps my favorite character... even though she is dead throughout the whole book. The main character, Victor, became more relatable later in the book, when he started going off the deep end. When I was reading Sara's memories about Victor, I thought h...more

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Sep 15, 2010 Aaron (Typographical Era) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, nook

There was a lot more meat to this one then I expected. It was fascinating on several levels: the science behind Alzheimer’s Disease, the way memory works (I’ve always been intrigued by the way different people remember the same event and by the way when recalling certain memories we can actually see ourselves in the situation as if we were a third party viewing the memory), and level of complexity to the characters introduced within the story.

The tricky thing at work here is to remember that al...more

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Aug 09, 2011 Stephan rated it 3 of 5 stars

I had anticipated this book exploring the ideas of memories and their differences from person to person. I'm not sure if expecting the story to veer in that direction tainted the books real direction - which was the main character mourning the loss of his wife and finding flashcards relaying situations he did not remember period and revealed his crumbling marriage before her death.

I had a hard time believing the characters voice matched his attributes (the main character is a 58 year old scienti...more

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Sep 17, 2010 Ryann rated it 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this novel by Rosecrans Baldwin and read it because he's a local author, and I'm interested in Alzheimer's. He captured research and long marriages well from my perspective, though I'm no expert on either. The book really wasn't about Alzheimer's at all, though it was about memory in general more from the perspective of the way individuals perceive and remember things. I thought the character development was unique and well done. All of his characters are believable, flawed, and comple...more

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Sep 04, 2010 Meredith Spidel rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Feb 12, 2013 Kaycie Hall rated it 3 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed Baldwin's prose and the idea behind this novel, but to be sort of honest, well, it lost me there. It took me much longer to get through this than it should have.

I liked the idea of Victor's grieving over the memory of his wife and how her idea of their marriage was so different from his own, but then there were the complications with all of the other characters surrounding him that were not so clear to me. They were muddled storylines, none of them really going far enough for m...more

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Feb 15, 2011 May-Ling rated it 3 of 5 stars

i loved the concept of this book, but character is just too important to me in a novel to overlook. the main character, an Alzheimer's scientist, has lost his wife of many years. he discovers a stack of notecards of her writing, revealing shared moments where both of them experienced memories in completely different ways.

i think this could have been a gem, but when you think the protagonist is a total fool that makes you feel empathy for all women he comes into contact with, it's a bit difficult...more

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Jul 11, 2010 Kelly Hager rated it 3 of 5 stars

Victor is an Alzheimer's researcher so it's not a stretch to say that memory is his life. So when he finds index cards that his late wife wrote, he's shocked to learn that she saw their life together a lot differently than he did--and she remembers key events in their relationship differently, as well.

This is a hard book to review because it's a very good book but not one that I particularly enjoyed. I didn't really like Victor. I did like Sara (the wife) but, while she's essential to the plot i...more

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Jan 23, 2012 Joe rated it 2 of 5 stars

2.5 Stars

I really enjoyed the idea of this book's premise: a recently widowed fellow is forced to reevaluate his marriage after finding notes his wife wrote that recount a version of their marriage which is remarkably different than he recalls. I was hoping for an interesting investigation into memory and meaning, but it kinda fizzled. I wasn't really sure why certain characters needed to be in this book. It also seemed like the main character was a scientist just so the author didn't have to re...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Marca rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Memories – can they be trusted? This is a saga that spans the life of Dr. Victor Aaron, now a widower, and his life and challenges since his wife die in an accident. Dr. Aaron researches Alzheimer’s disease and has built a prestigious career in academia. The novel goes back and forth between Victor’s memory and his late wife’s memory of events as he reads her notes and diaries. The pace is slow and meandering, but that’s how lives are. Victor’s life after his wife is killed is invaded by women w...more

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