Forgetting Elena starts out slow and strange; it’s unsettling and apt, the way it unfolds. It’s narrated by a man staying in a summer cottage with a group of other men. He seems new to the group and pathologically unsure of his place in it, or his place in the world, or just himself: he worries about being the first one awake, the first one using the bathroom: will anyone care? Do they have a set order of who gets to go first and next and next? He despairs after dinner: should he clear the table, or not? He is tentative in conversation. He tries to figure out the social hierarchy: one man might “quite possibly be an important official”; another is that man’s “houseboy, or perhaps secretary, valet, or younger brother” (pp 5-6). The group of men does seem to have its own strange social codes and customs, and also seems prone to fault-finding, but this doesn’t seem quite enough to account for the narrator’s intense anxiety. In the bathroom, as he shaves and gets ready for an evening out, he’s unsettled by having his things in this shared room: “what if I forgot something?,” he worries, and then it becomes clear that this worry, in a general sense, is the whole issue (p 11).
Raking pine needles on a hill behind a cottage (a task assigned to him by Herbert, the man he thinks might be an important official) the narrator pauses, and we get this, thematically apt, and also quite pleasing:
Closing my eyes, I determine the shape, position, and extension of my body by noticing: the pain in my stiff, steadily bobbing neck; the faint pressure of collecting sweat above my left eyebrow; the slow throbbing between my shoulders and at the base of my spine; the smooth roundness of the rake in my closed palm; the binding of the swimsuit across my hips; and the solidity of the earth under my feet, a force exerted more powerfully on my toes than on my heels, since I’m facing downhill. Aside from these few sensations, I feel nothing, either internally or externally, except the flow of breath escaping through my nostrils. If I were blind, and beginning consciousness this instant, would I be able to start from these few points of sensation and sketch in a fully accurate picture of my body? (p 32)
I like this book best when it’s like the passage above, or like some of the passages describing scenes on the beach, sandpipers and waves and foam, or the moments of affection or connection between characters: descriptive, realistic, recognizably this world and not some other. But this book is also enduringly odd: the narrator sees men parade across the dunes in robes of different colors, one wearing rubies and carrying a transistor radio. There are messengers and a Minister and the spontaneous writing of courtly poetry. Stacey D’Erasmo, writing in the New York Times Book Review, calls this book “finely wrought and peculiar,” and says that White’s first two novels (of which this is one) “seem to take place in elaborately embroidered floating worlds not quite our own.” Alan Friedman, also writing in the New York Times Book Review, three and a half decades earlier, calls the book “a Chinese puzzle,” and “uncannily beautiful.” Friedman also says, though, that it is “often difficult to be receptive to the book’s genuine wonders,” and I think I agree.
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