The Memory Painter

In Womack's debut novel, protagonists Bryan, the memory painter of the title, and Linz, a neurogeneticist studying memory, meet by accident in an exhibit of ancient Egyptian art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They each discover that the other suffers from powerful dreams; Bryan's are the source of pictures he paints in the style of Jan van Eyck. As the plot lurches from one coincidence to the next, it becomes clear to Bryan that the dreams are related, and that he and Linz have known each other in past lives. Indeed, Bryan has been the ancient Roman priest Origenes Adamantius, Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, a Japanese samurai, a scientist in the 1980s who was on the brink of a breakthrough in Alzheimer's research, and van Eyck as well. As a result he can speak 30 languages, and when he falls in love with Linz he knows it's not the first time. Suffering from the excruciating dreams but gaining more and more knowledge, Bryan begins to suspect that Linz's father, the head of a powerful company called Medicor, is somehow complicit in an evil scheme that has lasted millennia. Bryan only has to wait for Linz's dreams to catch up with his for them somehow to save the world from a threat that began with the ancient Egyptians. The chapters recounting their past lives are chock full of interesting historical tidbits, but careening through them feels more like being on a movie-themed ride at Disneyland than reading a novel. (May)