By Carolyn See,
who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com
Friday, July 25, 2008

THE MAN WHO FORGOT HOW TO READ

By Howard Engel

Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's. 157 pp. $19.95

Sometime in 2001, Howard Engel, a father, widower and Canadian writer of popular detective stories, woke up as he always did, went outside to pick up his daily newspaper and found that he couldn't read it. In his sleep, he had suffered a small stroke, but a stroke is only small when it's happening to somebody else. The episode left Engel without the ability to read, but he also showed enough other symptoms that he found himself for an extended time in a hospital and then in rehab, trying to regain his former self or at least come to terms with whatever self he had left. His wife had died, he had a son to raise, he was a member of the Canadian intellectual community. At some level, he had to get well, or at least well enough to take up the threads of his former life.

Engel had been a writer for most of his life, and his two former wives had been writers with him. His home was stacked with read and unread books. He had, some years earlier, invented the character of Benny Cooperman, a nice private detective who doesn't womanize or drink too much or get overly punched in the jaw, but who nevertheless manages to solve every mystery put in his way. Engel had experienced success; his life as a mystery writer was firmly in place.

But on this strange morning, his life was irrevocably changed. He was in an institution he couldn't recognize, for a length of time he couldn't measure, surrounded by people he scarcely knew. And although this memoir focuses on Engel's inability to read, it is also a fairly straightforward story of how a stroke victim might come back to a semblance of his earlier life, how his brain realigns itself in some way, how, with luck and determination, he might learn to function again in what we are pleased to call the real world. So, strictly speaking, this isn't the account of how a man learns to read again (Engel can read, but very slowly and laboriously), but rather the story of how a successful man of middle years suffers a stroke and, through a serious of ingenious coping devices, is able to retake his place in the community. Much of the first part of "The Man Who Forgot How to Read" is a tale about being trapped in a recalcitrant body with a brain that won't work very well. Engel tries to remember who he is and who the people around him are (he recognizes faces but very often forgets names). He tries to remember the way to the hospital cafeteria and -- harder still -- the way back to his room. He knows that some of his fellow patients are distinguished thinkers, but they're all in the same boat, cautiously polite to one another, feeling their ways through fragments of conversation, some of them unable to talk or walk, some of them sporting walkers or canes. He is in a place where great courage is evident, and his own is remarkable.

But the stated purpose of this book is to describe how the author lost his ability to read; the letters in that newspaper looked like Sanskrit to him and only gradually turned back into English characters. Even then, Engel couldn't make those letters turn into words he could recognize. However, he could talk, if haltingly, and eventually was able to plot out a detective novel in which his Cooperman lands in the hospital having been bonked on the head, with no idea of who committed this crime or why. And then -- with the help and encouragement of editors and friends -- Engel had the strength to write that novel. It took him ages to decipher a page by reading it, so he relied on his ears, his memory and the voices of people who read his text back to him, again and again, until he got it right.

This is, of course, an absolutely admirable accomplishment. But two things in the book are bothersome. At some point, a month or two after Engel returns home from rehab, one of his cats dies, and his son, Jacob, is "wounded by this family shock." This event is handled in 10 offhand lines and is pretty much the only place where his son makes an appearance. Engel appears baffled by the boy's show of emotion, which seems odd, since Jacob's mother has died and his father is still wandering in the grip of an extremely strange ailment; it's more than appropriate that the boy feels awful, but Engel lets us see himself as numb to emotion, perhaps another symptom that he simply never gets around to mentioning.

Oliver Sacks, who wrote an afterword to the Cooperman novel that was published after Engel's stroke, has also written an afterword to this memoir. As in so many of the case histories that Sacks records, his remarks here manage to reduce Engel to less-than-human status; not a writer with hopes and dreams, but an old Buick with a rusty carburetor. It's demeaning and adds little that the author hasn't already said for himself.

To be truthful, I found this book somewhat flat and affectless, but readers interested in the mysteries of memory, the mechanics of reading or how strokes impair the body might find something of use here.

· The mystery of the murdered spy.

· Witches, toil and trouble in modern Salem.

· A black family struggles to stay free in 19th-century Georgetown.

· Stefan Fatsis kicks a football.

· And Kenneth Pollack changes his mind.