Memory Board

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

Jane Rule’s Memory Board is a mature and wise exploration of family conflicts and love involving several generations and several kinds of love. The plot deals with the attempts of David and Diana, fraternal twins, to overcome an estrangement of 40 years, a division created by Diana’s lesbianism. As always in Rule’s fiction, lesbianism is not treated in a sensational way but as a given of her character’s nature. The emotional intimacy of Diana and her lover, Constance, is evoked superbly in the novel. Constance is suffering from short-term memory loss caused by a wartime injury, but the situation could as easily be Alzheimer’s syndrome, so the novel has a wide significance as it explores the problems of such an illness. The “memory board” of the title is a slate used to help the afflicted character remember daily tasks, but of course in a novelist of Rule’s abilities it functions as a complex symbol: many of the characters are trying to cope with or expunge the past. David’s conflicts with his daughters form much of the plot, and his problems with his deceased wife come up as well; consequently, the novel covers much of the range of family experience. A minor complication of the story involving a character with AIDS seems extraneous, an attempt to deal with one more issue. While the novel is emotionally convincing and perceptive, Memory Board convinces more for its insights and sheer goodwill toward complex and suffering people than for its novelistic ease.