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You Lost Me There
By turns funny, charming, and tragic, Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel takes us inside the heart and mind of Dr. Victor Aaron, a leading Alzheimer's researcher at the Soborg Institute on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Victor spends his days alternating between long hours in the sterile lab and running through memories of his late wife, Sara. He has preserved their marriage as a sort of perfect, if tumultuous, duet between two opposite but precisely compatible souls. But one day, in the midst of organizing his already hyperorganized life, Victor discovers a series of index cards covered in Sara's handwriting. They chronicle the major "changes in direction" of their marriage, written as part of a brief fling with couples counseling. Sara's version of their great love story is markedly different from his own, which, for the eminent memory specialist, is a startling revelation. Victor is forced to reevaluate and relive each moment of their marriage, never knowing is the revisions will hurt or hearten. Meanwhile, as Victor's faith in memory itself unravels, so too does his precisely balanced support network, a group of strong women-from his lab assistant to Aunt Betsy, doddering doyenne of the island-that had, so far, allowed him to avoid grieving.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published August 12, 2010
40 people are currently reading
1428 people want to read
About the author
Rosecrans Baldwin
10 books88 followersRosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 236 reviews
July 24, 2010
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.
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.
April 27, 2011
Victor Aaron is a dull, dull turd. Why would any of the other people in this book have a relationship with him? He was lame, self-centered and shitty. I would give 1.5 stars and would also like to punch the author in the balls.
May 26, 2013
This is turning out to be disappointingly heavy sledding. Maybe because the whole thing feels too much like a cerebral exercise -- the characters are there just as a means of exploring the fallibility of memory, not because there's a story that needs to be told.
I like a good story myself.
Update: 2 months later.
Oh dear. This "critically acclaimed" "novel of ideas" turns out to be just the kind of book that exposes me for what I am. The kind of reader who finds a certain kind of serious "novel of ideas" to be essentially unreadable. I like Rosecrans Baldwin (for reasons I'll explain below), I could see him straining to write a serious novel that would receive critical acclaim, I was rooting for him to succeed. And possibly, for some subset of discerning readers, he has. Those readers will need more patience than me. I found the characters uninteresting, the structural devices a little too forced, and the prose was way too solemn for my taste.
Here's the thing. While he was writing this novel, Rosecrans Baldwin spent 18 months in Paris working for a French ad agency. He documents this (often surreal) experience in a much looser, almost gossipy account called "Paris, I Love You, But You're Bringing me Down". That book is terrific -- in it, he manages to nail the absurdities of Parisian life hilariously.
I hate to say it, but the book that was presumably written as a diversion ended up being far better than "You Lost Me There". Not an entirely fair judgment, of course, since I never did manage to finish that earnest "novel of ideas" (insert weak "He lost me there" jokelet ad lib).
I am, of course, a confirmed philistine*, and your mileage may vary.
*: Despite my philistine status, I make no apologies for holding all authors to the minimum standard of writing a book that the reader will actually, you know, want to keep reading. Because of its failure to meet that standard, I can only give "You Lost Me There" one star.
I like a good story myself.
Update: 2 months later.
Oh dear. This "critically acclaimed" "novel of ideas" turns out to be just the kind of book that exposes me for what I am. The kind of reader who finds a certain kind of serious "novel of ideas" to be essentially unreadable. I like Rosecrans Baldwin (for reasons I'll explain below), I could see him straining to write a serious novel that would receive critical acclaim, I was rooting for him to succeed. And possibly, for some subset of discerning readers, he has. Those readers will need more patience than me. I found the characters uninteresting, the structural devices a little too forced, and the prose was way too solemn for my taste.
Here's the thing. While he was writing this novel, Rosecrans Baldwin spent 18 months in Paris working for a French ad agency. He documents this (often surreal) experience in a much looser, almost gossipy account called "Paris, I Love You, But You're Bringing me Down". That book is terrific -- in it, he manages to nail the absurdities of Parisian life hilariously.
I hate to say it, but the book that was presumably written as a diversion ended up being far better than "You Lost Me There". Not an entirely fair judgment, of course, since I never did manage to finish that earnest "novel of ideas" (insert weak "He lost me there" jokelet ad lib).
I am, of course, a confirmed philistine*, and your mileage may vary.
*: Despite my philistine status, I make no apologies for holding all authors to the minimum standard of writing a book that the reader will actually, you know, want to keep reading. Because of its failure to meet that standard, I can only give "You Lost Me There" one star.
June 25, 2012
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 violate with impunity, but in Baldwin's case just leads to a lot of "a [fill in the blank] would never talk like that to her [boss/lover/nephew]". Plus it's so boring and dreary. The revelations are too slight and buried in too many words for the reader to care. Seems like a very young man imagining how the late middle aged might live and love. Not good.
November 19, 2010
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.
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.
January 11, 2014
Okay - I would say he lost me there.. and there... and there. and even there.. and especially there... and moreover .. there and there and there.
This was one really lousy book.
There were times when the writing was so incoherent that I wondered if the galleys hadn't gotten mixed up in the printing. He - Baldwin- uses metaphors that make absolutely NO SENSE. By last night it had gotten so bad that I actually wrote some of them down.
Watch this:: (He's talking about his lab partners getting a grant application ready.(Pg 103)
"Days slipped by and the world shrank back to our lab's small proportions.........We had the tempo of an umbrella factory"
???????
Will some one out there tell me WHAT exactly is the tempo of an umbrella factory???. Is it fast? Is it slow??? Does anyone out there know?
Here's another: ( pg 97)
His friend Russell is taunting him here about a student who had killed himself after Victor-refused to help this kid with his homework.
Victor gets mad at Russell ; Russell is taunting him about this kid and for some reason he asks Victor-" So I was thinking.. How old are you?"
To which Victor replies:
.."Do me a favor. You remove your 9-11 sticker from your windshield, then we'll talk."
What is he talking about and how.. just HOW does that relate to how old Victor is????
All these incongruities.Unbelievable. I am giving his guy the benefit of the doubt by saying maybe the galleys were all mixed up in the printing.
Okay watch this( pg 121)
"I reached out my hand but she managed in getting up to duck her shoulders."
What??
I read that one over 5 times putting a comma in 5 different places. Nothing. No sense. Not one iota of sense.
You want me to go on? I won't.
Last thing though- has anyone done a word count on how MANY times he mentions " Wife beaters"?
I'd say in this book he brings up wife beaters easily 100 times. Maybe 150 .
Why? Does the author want us to see how hip he is by referring to men's undershirts as wife beaters?
Then he really takes the cake by describing a RUBBER wife beater that Bruce Willis is wearing in a poster.
Strike me dead but is Bruce Willis married to a dolphin? Does he beat her up??
Under the ocean?
This book is so incoherent that it gives me the willies.
Maybe the author was stoned out of gourd. That might explain all these weird and nonsensical analogies.
I'm desperate here. Give me anything at all to explain it.
What more can I say? This is probably one of the lousiest books I've ever read.
And as to the plot- don't even get me started.
Drek. Pure drek.JM
This was one really lousy book.
There were times when the writing was so incoherent that I wondered if the galleys hadn't gotten mixed up in the printing. He - Baldwin- uses metaphors that make absolutely NO SENSE. By last night it had gotten so bad that I actually wrote some of them down.
Watch this:: (He's talking about his lab partners getting a grant application ready.(Pg 103)
"Days slipped by and the world shrank back to our lab's small proportions.........We had the tempo of an umbrella factory"
???????
Will some one out there tell me WHAT exactly is the tempo of an umbrella factory???. Is it fast? Is it slow??? Does anyone out there know?
Here's another: ( pg 97)
His friend Russell is taunting him here about a student who had killed himself after Victor-refused to help this kid with his homework.
Victor gets mad at Russell ; Russell is taunting him about this kid and for some reason he asks Victor-" So I was thinking.. How old are you?"
To which Victor replies:
.."Do me a favor. You remove your 9-11 sticker from your windshield, then we'll talk."
What is he talking about and how.. just HOW does that relate to how old Victor is????
All these incongruities.Unbelievable. I am giving his guy the benefit of the doubt by saying maybe the galleys were all mixed up in the printing.
Okay watch this( pg 121)
"I reached out my hand but she managed in getting up to duck her shoulders."
What??
I read that one over 5 times putting a comma in 5 different places. Nothing. No sense. Not one iota of sense.
You want me to go on? I won't.
Last thing though- has anyone done a word count on how MANY times he mentions " Wife beaters"?
I'd say in this book he brings up wife beaters easily 100 times. Maybe 150 .
Why? Does the author want us to see how hip he is by referring to men's undershirts as wife beaters?
Then he really takes the cake by describing a RUBBER wife beater that Bruce Willis is wearing in a poster.
Strike me dead but is Bruce Willis married to a dolphin? Does he beat her up??
Under the ocean?
This book is so incoherent that it gives me the willies.
Maybe the author was stoned out of gourd. That might explain all these weird and nonsensical analogies.
I'm desperate here. Give me anything at all to explain it.
What more can I say? This is probably one of the lousiest books I've ever read.
And as to the plot- don't even get me started.
Drek. Pure drek.JM
May 4, 2014
Read 3/19/14 - 3/26/14
3 Stars - Recommended for readers who don't mind a slow story that turns and churns over loss and regret and misunderstanding
Pages: 304
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Released: 2010
I bought this book as a hardcover yeaaaaars ago at a book sale for a couple of bucks, drawn to it by the title and cover, less so by the jacket copy. The blurb refers to the book as " at turns funny, charming, and tragic". We'll get back to this in a moment.
I left it shelved with the countless other unread book-sale-binge-buys I've amassed over the years (god knows how many I have... enough to overstuff two entire bookshelves and then some), and didn't have an urge to pull it down and crack it open until my husband's work related three-week-long absence from home last month.
I was mopey and not thrilled that he was going to be gone from home for so long, and I needed to lose myself in a book that matched my current mood. And You Lost Me There sounded as though it would fit the bill nicely. The main character is a neuroscientist who's having a hard time getting over the loss of his wife. Rather than properly grieve her when she first passed away, he's been sort of casually dating his very-much-younger co-worker and sort of strangely lending himself out as a non-sexual boy-toy to his wife's very-much-older aunt. Until he discovers a bunch of index cards written out in his wife's handwriting, outlining her thoughts on their marriage... as part of a homework assignment given to them during a brief stint of couples counseling.
So here it comes, the big ah-ha moment. Our neuroscientist, who prides himself on his keen memory, since, well, you know, he STUDIES it for a living, is suddenly thrown into shock at the fact that his wife remembered their life together very differently than he did. Where he was wedded in ignorant bliss and struggles to separate one moment from another, his beloved Sara writes about specific, defining moments in their lives. Moments that had a major impact on her. Moments that he remembers quite differently, or worse, simply cannot recall at all.
So the question that chews at him, and so, in turn, should be chewing at us, is how two people can live their lives together and experience their time together so differently. Well, I don't need to read a three hundred page novel to be able to tell you that hey, guess what, people experience shit differently dude, suck it up and move on, be happy you found those cards because of the better-late-than-never insight it gives you into who you are when viewed from other people's perspectives, and just move on. Geesh.
And yeah, so I get it, he's a study-er of brains and memory and is totally weirded out by the unpredictable ways in which people experience, remember, and mentally file away moments. This part of it, I admit, fed right into a thing I've always found myself obsessing over - more so since I've had kids, but I've been doing it since I was in high school - which is (and you might think I'm a little bit crazy when I tell you this, but really, what do I care?) how we've got to come to terms with the fact that we will never, ever, really, truly know what it is like to be anyone other than ourselves. We won't ever really understand how other people see us, hear us, perceive us... we'll never feel how much they might hate us or love us, never know how much they think of us, or WHAT they think when they do think of us. And that's part of life. I might not like that my kids and husband have thoughts and feelings that are independent of me, but if I sit there and dwell on it I'm likely to drive myself bat-shit crazy.
But enough about me and my weird-ass mental games, right? Let's get back to Rosencrans and his failure to write a book that made me grip the pages with a fierce and sisterly sense of sameness. This book was soooo not the companion-to-my-misery I had hoped it would be. It went down a road I wasn't really interested in going down but followed reluctantly because, hell, I was already so many pages into it and I needed to finish it so it'd count against my goodreads challenge. (well, no not really.) I actually kept reading to see if it would get any better. I was still holding out hope for the whole "at turns funny, charming, and tragic" stuff. But no deal.
I didn't find it funny - it was actually kind of boring and sad in a "dude, please, just let it go" sort of way. I didn't find it charming - I actually had a great dislike for our protag and his self-centeredness and I was annoyed by his girl-friday and really had a hard time buying into the horny old broad. And tragic? Well, ok, I'll give Rosencrans that. It was a tragic in this sense - our poor neuroscientist was happy remembering his wife and their perfect marriage while bopping a chick that could have been his granddaughter. Those cards should have been left the hell alone. Watching him literally disintegrate right before our eyes was tragic. Tiresome, yes. But also tragic.
Ah, me. A mild disappointment, yet one that, as I sit here one month later, composing this review, I can still feel... I can remember how I felt as I read it, and that must mean something, yes?
3 Stars - Recommended for readers who don't mind a slow story that turns and churns over loss and regret and misunderstanding
Pages: 304
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Released: 2010
I bought this book as a hardcover yeaaaaars ago at a book sale for a couple of bucks, drawn to it by the title and cover, less so by the jacket copy. The blurb refers to the book as " at turns funny, charming, and tragic". We'll get back to this in a moment.
I left it shelved with the countless other unread book-sale-binge-buys I've amassed over the years (god knows how many I have... enough to overstuff two entire bookshelves and then some), and didn't have an urge to pull it down and crack it open until my husband's work related three-week-long absence from home last month.
I was mopey and not thrilled that he was going to be gone from home for so long, and I needed to lose myself in a book that matched my current mood. And You Lost Me There sounded as though it would fit the bill nicely. The main character is a neuroscientist who's having a hard time getting over the loss of his wife. Rather than properly grieve her when she first passed away, he's been sort of casually dating his very-much-younger co-worker and sort of strangely lending himself out as a non-sexual boy-toy to his wife's very-much-older aunt. Until he discovers a bunch of index cards written out in his wife's handwriting, outlining her thoughts on their marriage... as part of a homework assignment given to them during a brief stint of couples counseling.
So here it comes, the big ah-ha moment. Our neuroscientist, who prides himself on his keen memory, since, well, you know, he STUDIES it for a living, is suddenly thrown into shock at the fact that his wife remembered their life together very differently than he did. Where he was wedded in ignorant bliss and struggles to separate one moment from another, his beloved Sara writes about specific, defining moments in their lives. Moments that had a major impact on her. Moments that he remembers quite differently, or worse, simply cannot recall at all.
So the question that chews at him, and so, in turn, should be chewing at us, is how two people can live their lives together and experience their time together so differently. Well, I don't need to read a three hundred page novel to be able to tell you that hey, guess what, people experience shit differently dude, suck it up and move on, be happy you found those cards because of the better-late-than-never insight it gives you into who you are when viewed from other people's perspectives, and just move on. Geesh.
And yeah, so I get it, he's a study-er of brains and memory and is totally weirded out by the unpredictable ways in which people experience, remember, and mentally file away moments. This part of it, I admit, fed right into a thing I've always found myself obsessing over - more so since I've had kids, but I've been doing it since I was in high school - which is (and you might think I'm a little bit crazy when I tell you this, but really, what do I care?) how we've got to come to terms with the fact that we will never, ever, really, truly know what it is like to be anyone other than ourselves. We won't ever really understand how other people see us, hear us, perceive us... we'll never feel how much they might hate us or love us, never know how much they think of us, or WHAT they think when they do think of us. And that's part of life. I might not like that my kids and husband have thoughts and feelings that are independent of me, but if I sit there and dwell on it I'm likely to drive myself bat-shit crazy.
But enough about me and my weird-ass mental games, right? Let's get back to Rosencrans and his failure to write a book that made me grip the pages with a fierce and sisterly sense of sameness. This book was soooo not the companion-to-my-misery I had hoped it would be. It went down a road I wasn't really interested in going down but followed reluctantly because, hell, I was already so many pages into it and I needed to finish it so it'd count against my goodreads challenge. (well, no not really.) I actually kept reading to see if it would get any better. I was still holding out hope for the whole "at turns funny, charming, and tragic" stuff. But no deal.
I didn't find it funny - it was actually kind of boring and sad in a "dude, please, just let it go" sort of way. I didn't find it charming - I actually had a great dislike for our protag and his self-centeredness and I was annoyed by his girl-friday and really had a hard time buying into the horny old broad. And tragic? Well, ok, I'll give Rosencrans that. It was a tragic in this sense - our poor neuroscientist was happy remembering his wife and their perfect marriage while bopping a chick that could have been his granddaughter. Those cards should have been left the hell alone. Watching him literally disintegrate right before our eyes was tragic. Tiresome, yes. But also tragic.
Ah, me. A mild disappointment, yet one that, as I sit here one month later, composing this review, I can still feel... I can remember how I felt as I read it, and that must mean something, yes?
December 19, 2020
A totally unlikeable main character. Not sure why I read to the end, but was hoping it would get better. Meh.
August 12, 2010
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?
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?
July 19, 2010
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 he was completely annoying, but I'm pretty sure that was the point. All in all, this book was a good summer read for me about a smart and strange man, who desperately needs some therapy and his twisted relationships with a burlesque dancer, a best friend he hates, his dead wife's memories, his dead wife's aunt, and his hippie-ish god daughter that doesn't know what to do with her life. The book is filled with dark comedy and some oddly touching moments that make me glad I was one of the first to read it. My applause to Rosecrans Baldwin.
February 22, 2011
this book lost me somewhere in the first hundred pages. i was intrigued by the premise--alzheimer's researcher finds his own memories unreliable after his wife's unexpected death--but it never really panned out. what annoyed me most was the way the characters talked to each other--something about their dialogue just baffled me, as if they all knew what they were talking about, but i didn't. the last third of the book picked up a bit, and i was satisfied to have finished it, but frankly, if i'd had something i was excited about waiting on my to-read list, i probably wouldn't have bothered.
October 20, 2017
”Research in my experience was less a devotion than a small business, a type of farm-league baseball where most of our work was keeping together a decent team and raising money for new uniforms.”
Baldwin is one of the founders of The Morning News (https://themorningnews.org/). That online magazine is the home of The Tournament of Books (ToB), one of my favorite yearly events. If you have read any of my reviews you will know that I obsess over the ToB during March of every year. That was pretty much all I knew about Baldwin, although I had learned that he had written several books.
I decided that anyone who had helped introduce me to so many good novels, deserved my reading attention. I looked over Baldwin’s works and decided to start with this one. I was intrigued by the way Baldwin appeared to be looking at memory.
I do like the way Baldwin looks at what seems to me to be a common occurrence – the conflict between how two people remember shared experiences. The main character, Dr. Aaron, is trying to find a cure for dementia. So, memory is extremely important to him. He discovers that his wife remembered events of their marriage in a very different way than he did. All in all, I found the way Baldwin sets up his story very satisfying. The novel reminded me just a bit of The Photograph by Penelope Lively. However, it moved in very different directions.
My one problem with this novel was that I could never feel any attachment to Dr. Aaron. He remained distant for me and that kept his story from totally involving me. I am not sure why this happened. Possibly because I haven’t experienced what Dr. Aaron is living through and I don’t want to.
Although this wasn’t my favorite book, I will be looking for more from Baldwin. I liked his style and ideas. Not every book speaks to every reader.
Baldwin is one of the founders of The Morning News (https://themorningnews.org/). That online magazine is the home of The Tournament of Books (ToB), one of my favorite yearly events. If you have read any of my reviews you will know that I obsess over the ToB during March of every year. That was pretty much all I knew about Baldwin, although I had learned that he had written several books.
I decided that anyone who had helped introduce me to so many good novels, deserved my reading attention. I looked over Baldwin’s works and decided to start with this one. I was intrigued by the way Baldwin appeared to be looking at memory.
I do like the way Baldwin looks at what seems to me to be a common occurrence – the conflict between how two people remember shared experiences. The main character, Dr. Aaron, is trying to find a cure for dementia. So, memory is extremely important to him. He discovers that his wife remembered events of their marriage in a very different way than he did. All in all, I found the way Baldwin sets up his story very satisfying. The novel reminded me just a bit of The Photograph by Penelope Lively. However, it moved in very different directions.
My one problem with this novel was that I could never feel any attachment to Dr. Aaron. He remained distant for me and that kept his story from totally involving me. I am not sure why this happened. Possibly because I haven’t experienced what Dr. Aaron is living through and I don’t want to.
Although this wasn’t my favorite book, I will be looking for more from Baldwin. I liked his style and ideas. Not every book speaks to every reader.
June 23, 2012
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 show us the women through the main character's point of view, and he clearly doesn't understand them or see them as three dimensional, but that doesn't actually make me like the book any more. The dialogue is clunky at its best and totally unrealistic at its worst.
Also, there's this weird Bruce Willis motif that keeps coming up over and over again that just feels comical, but not intentionally so. In fact, there are several times in the book where it seems like the author was musing on something else in some other facet of his writing life, and then he decided to plop it into this book. The Bruce Willis thing is one of those times, but also there are these poems that one of the characters writes that seem jammed in there for no good reason.
Also, there's this weird Bruce Willis motif that keeps coming up over and over again that just feels comical, but not intentionally so. In fact, there are several times in the book where it seems like the author was musing on something else in some other facet of his writing life, and then he decided to plop it into this book. The Bruce Willis thing is one of those times, but also there are these poems that one of the characters writes that seem jammed in there for no good reason.
September 6, 2023
Very disappointing. The plot sounded interesting--- a widower learns that his wife has left notes about aspects of their marriage, but finds her views disagree with his memories. But the execution was poorly written and confusing.
And maybe it's my age, but I've no more patience for protagonists who are male fantasies. This one is a dull older man, a scientist with little to say for himself. But somehow he attracts a 25 year old beauty who not only loves him (!) but revels in dancing burlesque for him! Does this sound remotely possible?
And maybe it's my age, but I've no more patience for protagonists who are male fantasies. This one is a dull older man, a scientist with little to say for himself. But somehow he attracts a 25 year old beauty who not only loves him (!) but revels in dancing burlesque for him! Does this sound remotely possible?
March 14, 2011
I appreciated how the structure of the prose mimicked how the brain stores and recalls memories--appropriate, since the MC is an Alzheimer's researcher. But the characters were so unlikable I really didn't enjoy this read very much. I normally have a fairly high level of tolerance for reading about the problems of the privileged, but this guy was all, "Boo hoo, I'm a middle-aged white male, and I can't maintain an erection, and everybody uses email and I can't figure out how it works, and aren't I a hero for not hitting on my 22-year-old goddaughter?"
August 2, 2011
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.
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.
July 21, 2010
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.
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.
Read
October 28, 2019this book is very nice........
lose of emotions and love
lose of emotions and love
September 17, 2013
Nah, dude. The idea/outline/plot here is that a doctor studying Alzheimer's comes upon some index cards his late wife had written about their marriage and this forces him to call into question their past. (Which cards, by the way, are extremely eloquent and perfectly punctuated for being index cards--we're talking full-on dialogue, and pages of it, a notion I suppose we're meant to just swallow as readers, but I for one wasn't able to suspend my disbelief there.) But the index cards have just about zero effect on the novel. First off, our narrator (Victor) has already read them at the start of the book, but Baldwin only reveals them to the reader one at a time, at the start of each chapter, which is tidy, but absolutely diminishing to their effect. They reveal nothing (except that the wife was less happy than Victor may have thought, which one can assume given that this is, well, literature), nor do they inform the narrative in any way. In other words, the book is pretty boring. Sure, memory is a theme if not the theme, such that flashbacks and anecdotal "Sara once said . . . " snippets are rampant, but just because these work thematically doesn't mean they don't completely slow down the narrative to the detriment of the reading experience. I'm not asking for guns and tits and car chases here, but can we focus on the present for a stretch? Can something, in other words, happen? No, things do happen. Just way too often this forward thrust is interrupted by a flashback.
Or else, gah, fascinating passages like this one:
I was packing the backpack when I noticed that my iPod was out of juice. I'd seen Cornelia unplug hers from her laptop before breakfast, leaving the white cord dangling like a tail, so I sat down and plugged in mine, and then stared dumbly at the password screen.
"I just wanted to charge my iPod," I said when Cornelia appeared.
"No worries. It's 'early bird special,' no spaces."
I typed it in. The password screen vanished.
We then get a little explanation of why Cornelia uses earlybirdspecial as her password—which, again, has to do with memory, but come ON. And "dangling like a tail"? (Also, do you even need a password to plug an iPod into a computer??) Other choice poetics include: "The sunset was a B-movie star—cheap, pink, and gold." Really? Really? Or, the less horrible but still awkward: "My eyelids felt like metal shutters as a result of the sleeping pills." It's probably unfair and petty of me to call out lines like this, but, point being, the prose doesn't necessarily dazzle, though it's competent throughout. Cheap, pink, and gold, though? And then Bruce Willis keeps showing up—this is sort of explained/justified, but not really. It's almost like a friend dared Baldwin to use Bruce Willis in his novel, and paid him (Baldwin) per mention.
I mentioned tits earlier. At the start of the book, Narrator Victor (who I didn't buy for a second was almost 60, or anywhere near 35 for that matter) is dating a twenty-something burlesque dancer. That sort of ends, and soon thereafter Victor's best friend's twenty-something daughter (similarly exoticized, this time through a massive head of dreads) moves in with him, and sexual tension abounds, though Victor seems completely unaware. She sits on his lap, she reads on the lawn in a white bikini, he "tucks her into bed," he goes out to see her in her white bikini in his underwear, he walks into his living room in the morning to find her naked on the couch, and describes her breasts and aureolas, though throughout all this he remains completely unaware that she's basically a surrogate for his ex(ish)-girlfriend. Which is just odd. Or, I guess maybe not odd, since Victor doesn't really feel anything throughout the novel--another sort of theme, and one that again doesn't really make for an interesting novel.
As I said, Victor definitely seems more like a 30 year old than a 60 year old. Do 60 year olds dream about getting blow jobs from girls they knew in high school? I don't know, but there were about a million things besides that made this guy seem way younger than he was supposed to be. This, in the end, was probably the most distracting or off-putting thing about the novel.
Or else, gah, fascinating passages like this one:
I was packing the backpack when I noticed that my iPod was out of juice. I'd seen Cornelia unplug hers from her laptop before breakfast, leaving the white cord dangling like a tail, so I sat down and plugged in mine, and then stared dumbly at the password screen.
"I just wanted to charge my iPod," I said when Cornelia appeared.
"No worries. It's 'early bird special,' no spaces."
I typed it in. The password screen vanished.
We then get a little explanation of why Cornelia uses earlybirdspecial as her password—which, again, has to do with memory, but come ON. And "dangling like a tail"? (Also, do you even need a password to plug an iPod into a computer??) Other choice poetics include: "The sunset was a B-movie star—cheap, pink, and gold." Really? Really? Or, the less horrible but still awkward: "My eyelids felt like metal shutters as a result of the sleeping pills." It's probably unfair and petty of me to call out lines like this, but, point being, the prose doesn't necessarily dazzle, though it's competent throughout. Cheap, pink, and gold, though? And then Bruce Willis keeps showing up—this is sort of explained/justified, but not really. It's almost like a friend dared Baldwin to use Bruce Willis in his novel, and paid him (Baldwin) per mention.
I mentioned tits earlier. At the start of the book, Narrator Victor (who I didn't buy for a second was almost 60, or anywhere near 35 for that matter) is dating a twenty-something burlesque dancer. That sort of ends, and soon thereafter Victor's best friend's twenty-something daughter (similarly exoticized, this time through a massive head of dreads) moves in with him, and sexual tension abounds, though Victor seems completely unaware. She sits on his lap, she reads on the lawn in a white bikini, he "tucks her into bed," he goes out to see her in her white bikini in his underwear, he walks into his living room in the morning to find her naked on the couch, and describes her breasts and aureolas, though throughout all this he remains completely unaware that she's basically a surrogate for his ex(ish)-girlfriend. Which is just odd. Or, I guess maybe not odd, since Victor doesn't really feel anything throughout the novel--another sort of theme, and one that again doesn't really make for an interesting novel.
As I said, Victor definitely seems more like a 30 year old than a 60 year old. Do 60 year olds dream about getting blow jobs from girls they knew in high school? I don't know, but there were about a million things besides that made this guy seem way younger than he was supposed to be. This, in the end, was probably the most distracting or off-putting thing about the novel.
February 13, 2011
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.
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.
January 19, 2015
Although this book started out slow I enjoyed it. I thought it was very interesting the way he delved into how one memory of the same event could differ so much from one person to the other. How he dealt with his grief was very interesting. There was so much going on in his life , yet nothing at all. There were many distractions to his grieving processes and 8 could see why he would welcome them.
August 27, 2010
I gave this one 75 pages and just wasn't feelin' it. I could set it down easily, and picking it up was out of a sense of duty rather than an urge. Since I have a stack of other books waiting for me, I gave myself permission to abandon it, and if I missed out on an awesome book here, I can live with that. (Insert "you lost me there" joke here!)
January 12, 2011
Dear Book: Apt title! PS: Unless you know you're "Memoirs of a Geisha" or the like, don't call yourself "You Lost Me There." Seems like a bad idea. You lost me at page 70ish, when I realized all your male characters were totally cliche and the idea you started with was going nowhere. Bah. Sincerely, Someone Who Tried to Like You
March 22, 2025
the plot of this book sounded so interesting. lots of potential! 50 pages in i was still a bit bored, hoping it was about to pick up and get good. it's all over the place, i feel like these characters are thrown in for no real reason, things just never go where they needed to or could have.
i also might just be young/dumb but a lot of the references the author made and the way he tells things i just didn't "get" and it came off pretentious.
i was expecting something profound about these cards he finds mixed with seeing his marriage completely different from how his wife did and this paralelling to his alzheimer's research, but it's like he learned nothing (unless it just went over my head, but even so, this wasn't very enjoyable).
i also might just be young/dumb but a lot of the references the author made and the way he tells things i just didn't "get" and it came off pretentious.
i was expecting something profound about these cards he finds mixed with seeing his marriage completely different from how his wife did and this paralelling to his alzheimer's research, but it's like he learned nothing (unless it just went over my head, but even so, this wasn't very enjoyable).
April 20, 2023
What drew me to this book was the setting: Bar Harbor and the whole Mount Desert Island. I know it well and it's always fun to find references to places you know, and he puts in plenty of them. The Soborg Institute is fictional, but everything else is real.
Unfortunately, this book is just too cryptic. I gave up at page 60. Why read a book where you have no idea what the characters are talking about? Where you read and reread paragraphs and pages, over and over, trying to figure it out? I spent way too much time on it. HE LOST ME! Everything was nonsensical, 2 + 2 didn't add up to anything. Should a reader have to work that hard?
Unfortunately, this book is just too cryptic. I gave up at page 60. Why read a book where you have no idea what the characters are talking about? Where you read and reread paragraphs and pages, over and over, trying to figure it out? I spent way too much time on it. HE LOST ME! Everything was nonsensical, 2 + 2 didn't add up to anything. Should a reader have to work that hard?
August 23, 2024
Meandering story of an Alzheimers research scientist who finds notes from his dead wife that completely contradict his memory of their relationship. The author has the annoying habit of stringing together alternating lines of dialogue without keeping clear who is speaking, requiring the reader (well, this reader at any rate) to go to the beginning of the conversation and follow down, him, her, him, her, etc. There are some interesting insights, and I do enjoy novels set in New England academia. I could have gotten into this but it's just so grim. A little bit of humor would have gone a long way. I ditched it after about 90 pages; I just didn't care.
November 5, 2017
This book reminded me a lot of "Everything I Never Told You". It's about a very left-brained, scientist husband who discovers secrets about his very right-brained, artistic wife after she dies in a car accident. Do we really ever know someone else?
"Of course there were good days, days we spent motoring up through the Hudson Valley, nights out at the movies, nights in bed with the lights off, just talking. But the bigger picture? How I saw the pattern at that point? Our marriage was a book written by authors in separate houses."
Rosecrans Baldwin, You Lost Me There
"Of course there were good days, days we spent motoring up through the Hudson Valley, nights out at the movies, nights in bed with the lights off, just talking. But the bigger picture? How I saw the pattern at that point? Our marriage was a book written by authors in separate houses."
Rosecrans Baldwin, You Lost Me There
November 2, 2021
You Lost Me There lost me very early in the book. At 73 you would think that I would learn to stop reading books that I dislike... I think the point of the book is that Victor as a scientist has never engaged his emotional life. He probably contributed to the death of his wife. He abuses a young woman via his power in a university. He ignores the attempts of his research partner to engage him as a human being. So what does he do when he finally confronts his grief, or lack thereof, he turns into a pissing nudist. What a waste of my time. Kristi & Abby Tabby
July 1, 2017
Somewhere between 2.5 and 3 stars.
Could also be called Old People get Wild and Cranky.
The premise of the book is interesting- finding out what your wife thought of your marriage- after she has died by reading notes- almost like a diary.
The main character is not an easy man to like but quirky and interesting. His aunt Betsy a female curmudgeon, not often seen in novels. The other characters were less interesting to me. Still I am not sorry I read it.
Could also be called Old People get Wild and Cranky.
The premise of the book is interesting- finding out what your wife thought of your marriage- after she has died by reading notes- almost like a diary.
The main character is not an easy man to like but quirky and interesting. His aunt Betsy a female curmudgeon, not often seen in novels. The other characters were less interesting to me. Still I am not sorry I read it.
December 19, 2018
This book oversells and under-delivers. The blurb on the back of the book makes it seem like there will be some irony in the book and the central conceit will pay off. Instead, it's just 300 pages about someone stuck in grief and the "plot" (such as it is) doesn't even kick in until the end. 300 meandering pages about a man and his dead wife.
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