Memory Wax

In Memory Wax a husband's unfaithfulness unleashes the quasi-mytic violence of his wife's bloodiest imaginings. Somewhere between her thoughts and her deeds the reader stands witness to the knowledge that doing justice to one's own experience entails the most grotesque transfigurations. Delta Tells, the eloquent protagonist of Singer's novel, testifies to this belief in a riveting succession of scenes which pit her against the intimidations of an intractable physical world: the sexual indifference of her husband, the physical jealousness and recalcitrant organs of the women to who she ministers as midwife, the gravity of her own troubled motherhood, and the authorities who suspect her of committing an unimaginable crime against Nature. Delta's telling of this crime is meant to be the unraveling of anyone who might believe it. And so the husband's desperation to test the truthfulness of his wife's vengeful tale beings to loom as a portentous question about how we gauge the limits of our experience-sexual, intellectual, emotional-or whether any such limits apply.

Written in a baroque prose that animates the most visceral knowledge of psychological extremis, Memory Wax is that rare thing, a philosophical novel sustained by sensuous excitements. It invites comparison with the novels of James and Faulkner. But no comparison can capture the quality of a reading experience which in the end challenges the reader's own security about the dangerous line dividing the body from the mind, the body from the book