Late in Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s multi-layered novel, A Stranger Comes to Town, protagonist Joe Marzino says, “There are so many ways of forgetting,” words that hardly come as a revelation to the reader. Schwartz has already led us through a fascinating meditation on forgetfulness – some of it selectively orchestrated, some induced by trauma or age, some “ordinary act[s]of forgetting,” and much of it a result of amnesia. A Stranger Comes to Town is many other things, too. At times it feels like an exploration into the very essence of fiction. Perhaps most importantly, as a piece of fiction itself, the novel is a deeply engaging story of what happens when the man “coming to town” with an obliterated memory is a stranger to himself.
At 203 pages of clean, efficient prose, Schwartz’s novel is a deceptively easy read. It begins with Joe Marzino, who has a twin sister, looking at himself in a mirror, an image suggesting another of the book’s considerations: the nature of identity and the difficulties people face understanding, in Joe’s mother’s words, “the truth about their lives.” Having just been diagnosed with amnesia after a bicycle accident, Joe observes the superficial rather than emotional, which would require memory:
At the moment I can’t offer a thorough introduction. The mirror shows that I’m a white male, late thirties, fairly good looking in an unremarkable way, nice cheekbones, hair light brown, eyes grey, face that improves considerably with a smile, which I’m finding hard to do just now.
The narrator then tells us about his amnesia, explaining in detail that unlike depictions of the ailment in novels and movies, his amnesia is “retrograde amnesia.” These fictional portrayals are not medically valid, Joe explains. To support this theory, he cites the work of novelist Jonathan Lethem, who has edited an anthology of short stories about amnesia. (The novel is filled with references to books and movies.) What’s fascinating here is that Schwartz, in trying to convince us that Joe’s amnesia isn’t like fictional amnesia (despite the fact that Joe is, of course, a fictional character), cites a novelist whose anthology is a collection of fictional works. Schwartz plays with this idea of fiction and reality in the very title of the novel, which is taken from Tolstoy’s observation that “All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” In Schwartz’s novel, Joe Marzino does both: he goes on a journey of self-discovery when he comes to town as a stranger.
We learn about Joe’s past as he does. He’s been married to his wife, Norah, for fifteen years and has children ranging from ages four to sixteen named Luz, Kevin, and Vincent. When Joe first meets his wife at the hospital after the accident, he of course doesn’t recognize her. He observes that she “looked like someone who knew exactly who she was,” a telling description from a man who is just starting to learn who he is.
Joe also learns things about himself that he’d rather not know, what he refers to as his “hierarchy of bad deeds.” As Norah tells him about these episodes, Joe, in turn, tells us. Because the two discuss Joe’s past at night, they call them “bedtime stories,” giving us another narrative (a story within a story, if you will) in addition to the story of Joe’s recovery. This history that Joe learns about is more than mere backstory. One might argue that this past is who Joe is. Or is it? One of the questions that Schwartz seems to be subtly asking is whether we are merely the sum of what has happened in our lives. When Norah explains to Joe that the cyclist who hit him died in the accident, she tells him that he is lucky. “You lost your memory,” she says. “He lost his life.” Joe thinks, “I lost my life, too.” For Joe, losing memory – the ability to recall the minor and major events of his life — is like losing life itself.
The convincing honesty with which Joe reacts to and describes some of the shameful moments in his life serves to turn what should be an essentially unreliable narrator – a man who has amnesia – into someone we’re inclined to believe. One part of Joe’s life that we understand not to believe is the role he plays as a detective named Skellings in the TV series, Crime City. That Joe is a professional actor as he tries to act out his real life is especially rich. The boundary between the fiction of the crime show and the reality of the novel can get fuzzy in other ways, too. When Joe’s mother learns of his accident, she’s not only worried about Joe, but also his fictional character, Skellings. As Norah explains to Joe, “She’s very taken with him. He’s so attractive in that leather jacket, she always says.” Joe himself also begins to further blur the line between his life and the show’s when Skellings’ occasional lover tells him she’s pregnant with this baby. Joe spends the next few weeks anxiously waiting to learn the series’ plot trajectory and is “vastly relieved to see that Cheryl has had a miscarriage.”
That A Stranger Comes to Town references a number of real-world events feels important in part because this grounds the story in a specific time and place. We first learn that the narrative takes place during the Obama years and then, more precisely, around the time of the bombing at the Boston Marathon. And because much of his memory has been erased, Joe only has a piecemeal recollection of 9/11, the most significant event in our combined personal and collective memories of this century. In these days when so much of our history is forgotten or ignored, it’s hard to read Schwartz’s extraordinary novel (and contemporary fiction doesn’t get much better than this) without thinking about the dangers of a collective amnesia and our present political state. Even Joe, who has forgotten so much, says, “That the world is a perilous place is not really new to me.”
Ken Harvey is a writer living in Toronto. His latest novel is The Book of Casey Adair (2021), published by the University of Wisconsin Press. His collection of short stories, if you were with me everything would be all right won the Violet Quill Award for Best New Gay Fiction.