The Definitions

Greene (Ostrich) delivers a weighty metaphysical and metafictional novel about a near future in which a virus wipes out people’s memories. The unnamed narrator lives in a rehabilitation center where those who were infected are educated in art, ethics, math, and 21st-century history, with the promise that once they’ve learned enough, they’ll be released. The narrator is writing down their memories in hopes of holding on to them and pondering how one’s identity is shaped by language and narrative (“It was impossible to capture an essence in a word,” they think, concluding that “words, regardless of their inexactness... had the power to knit people together into novel arrangements”). Their interactions with fellow patients often combine the banal and grotesque: the narrator is asked at one point to bite a wart off another patient’s toe because she is unable to reach it (“I was disgusted, and, at the same time, I was strangely drawn to it”). Elsewhere, the narrator muses on lessons from the center’s English teacher (“for a story to be a story, it had always to be escalating. Otherwise, it was just a description”). The dystopian premise feels a bit thin, but the narrator’s playful riffs on the nature of fiction gradually reveal what Greene is up to. Readers will find much to ponder. (Dec.)