Memory House

In this arresting posthumous novel from Kraf (Find Him!), who died in 2013, washed-up writer Marlane Frack attends a mysterious retreat for former artists. In residence are “ex-artists” of various disciplines: poets, composers, ballerinas, choreographers, the “original abstract expressionists” and their “silenced and battered” wives, preeminent physicists, and even a dentist who invented a surgical procedure for nuclear dental transplants. Some seek rehabilitation and “creative rebirth,” while others are “permanent residents” who staged their deaths to “resign” from their work. Having left behind an erratic husband haunted by combat in the Vietnam War, Marlane reignites an old rivalry with fellow resident and former friend Nadia Lagoon, a poet who forces her to confront her tortured relationship with her father. She undergoes a series of surreal treatments, including an olfactory “memory rejuvenation and excision” from Doctor Amazing, a tall, smiling man in a striped dashiki who stuffs her nostrils with cotton soaked with the smells of her childhood. An eerie dreamlike logic expands Marlane’s struggle for creative agency into a hypnotic consideration of how memories can distort or shape reality. In this funhouse narrative, meaning slips away into an accelerating spiral of bizarre events. Readers will find it an impressive exploration of an artist’s inner life. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House. (May)