Toward Amnesia

With unerring emotional clarity, Van Arsdale, in a poetic first novel, charts a woman's search for the land of amnesia, ``where memory plagues no one,'' in the aftermath of her abandonment by the most important woman in her life, her lover and best friend. When it becomes clear that Libby has no plans to return home, and she tires of having to ``explain again that feeling of having all the air forced from my lungs,'' the nameless protagonist, a research biologist, decides to walk out of her own life. She stores away in her attic in Durham, N.C., all of the mementos of her years with Libby, packs a couple of bags, cleans out her bank accounts, trades in her Toyota for a 1950 Chevy Bel-Air and drives off. Stopping along the way in a library, she finds in a medical reference the condition she hopes to induce. ``And maybe it wouldn't have to be transient,'' she thinks. Eventually she heads the old Bel-Air north and west, aiming for a nameless island in a lake near the Canadian border. Here, she rents a cottage, renames herself ``Virginia,'' cuts her hair and practices her amnesia exercises-which include learning to write with her left hand and drinking her coffee black. Her quest for oblivion is hampered by memories evoked by grocery stores, canoes and birthdays until, one day, Virginia suddenly realizes that she no longer has to work at it. Practical-minded readers will be troubled at first by such issues as mortgages and bills unpaid, by unforwarded mail and families left behind, but few will long remain immune to this telling of a fantasy entertained at one time or another by anyone who has ever felt the urge to flee in the face of pain. (Jan.)