By Reviewed by Peter Pierce
FICTION
By Andrea Goldsmith
Fourth Estate, $29.99
The epigraph from Delmore Schwartz in Andrea Goldsmith's The Memory Trap works – as epigraphs should – as a forewarning: "each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to review itself." The comment is especially apt for Nina Jameson, an Australian expatriate, now London-based, international consultant on memorial projects. When we encounter her, it seems the 12-year marriage she had thought idyllic has ended. With dreary and wounding conventionality, her husband has left Nina for a research assistant half his age.
This is how Goldsmith introduces him: "Daniel Ryman appeared, divorced father of two, 17 years her senior, a futurologist to her memory keeper." They met, in one of Goldsmith's many assured small touches, at Edinburgh in 1997 at a conference on cultural time. This is what Nina will reflect: "how mindlessly does happiness trade in forevers." In consequence of Daniel's betrayal, the grieving Nina accepts a commission in which she has no faith, from the Together in Freedom coalition, because it will be the excuse to take her home to Melbourne.
From the collapse of her marriage, Nina returns to the ruins of that of her older sister, Zoe, which is "rotting beneath a thin crust of convention". In New York, in 1989, Zoe was wooed by and married Elliot, an American academic and literary biographer of such "big women" as Mary McCarthy and Djuna Barnes. The current project is Elizabeth Hardwick, most formidable of the ex-wives of Robert Lowell.
An ex-alcoholic, Elliot fills their days with reproaches of his wife, for all that he appears to love her. His pain is sharpened because Zoe is consumed by an asexual passion for the friend of her childhood, Ramsay Blake, an artistic prodigy (in the top 40, if not top 20, pianists in the world) and emotional cipher who is skilled in securing others to pander to his needs.
If Ramsay develops little in the course of the novel, Elliot does, and in ways that illuminate Goldsmith's narrative dash.
Persistently she dismantles the first impressions we have been allowed to form of her characters. Successively given their own points-of-view, and stories, they complicate our views of them; enlist our sympathies.
Goldsmith's shifts of angle would have horrified such a purist as Henry James. On the other hand, he would have been comfortable with the cast of upper middle-class, articulate, tormented, high-achieving characters Goldsmith has assembled. He would also have applauded the risks she takes with long passages of intellectual conversation, say on memorials. There are discussions with the earnest TIF members as Nina tries "injecting damp realism into their ambitions". She gives a spirited defence of some memorials; disparages others.
In particular she discusses them with Sean Blake, Ramsay's gay and estranged brother, a foreign correspondent and travel writer who is now "a swollen, slapdash version of his former self". Through Nina, Goldsmith brings to fresh view and understanding the Korean Veterans' Memorial in Washington, the 1962 Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation tucked in behind Notre Dame in Paris, and the disappearing Harburg Monument against Fascism in Hamburg that gradually (and deliberately) sank beneath the ground between 1986 and 1991.
This is a bravura performance of intellect and imagination.
This is a meditation on memory – the perils of too much reliance upon it and the wilfulness of misremembering. For Ramsay, memory is merely a muscle the pianist needs to train, while for Nina it involves an effort of empathy, and perhaps also of invention.
What Goldsmith essays in the last part of her novel is an exploration of the links between memory and forgiveness. It may not be, as Nina thinks, that "with memory in her court, and only her court, she could do whatever she liked". Forgiveness concedes the power of remembrance and then – as far as possible – annuls it. This is not at all the same process as forgetting.
Goldsmith springs plenty of surprises and coincidences as the book reaches its several and separate resolutions. It is an adult entertainment – passionate, thoughtful, disconcerting – and altogether to be welcomed.
Andrea Goldsmith is a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Peter Pierce is the editor of The Cam-bridge History of Aus-tralian Literature.