Time and time again
New book an ingenious literary memory maze
Abigail Willard meets herself coming and going.
Literally. The heroine of Debra Jo Immergut’s second novel, You Again, keeps colliding with her younger self in New York. At first Abigail, a married, middle-aged mother of two, assumes she’s seeing a freakishly similar look-alike. But the girl with her hairstyle is wearing her shoes and raincoat, and she is making out with Abigail’s dangerous addict ex-boyfriend: It is, maybe, Abigail herself. And her younger self must be warned.
You Again is an alluring mystery from Immergut. It’s also an elegant literary puzzle. Is Abigail, a talented painter who abandoned her art for marriage, parenthood and a dull job as an art director, experiencing a typical mid-life crisis? She’s certainly checking things off the mid-life crisis to-do list, including an infidelity.
Trying to crack the Abigail case is the job of the novel’s secondary cast. Police detective Jameson Leverett meets her when her budding-activist teenage son is arrested for an antifa action. The detective has funnelled her file to a neurologist in Montreal, and to a physics professor in California. It isn’t giving away too much to reveal that their research focuses on an accident that occurred when Abigail was the age of her Manhattan doppelgänger. Emails between this trio to discuss their hypotheses on her bizarre behaviour are scattered throughout the novel, with therapists’ notes on Abigail and her mysterious double, known only as “A.”
You Again offers a sophisticated argument about the nature of time and memory: “Although we experience time as unidimensional — as a unidirectional sequence of events — physicists have known this to be an illusion since Einstein.”
Balancing the kinetic plot — which involves, among other things, an international ring of thieves — with a realistic portrait of an ordinary marriage is no mean feat. But Immergut writes well about the kind of weary, longing that can grow to define a long-term marriage.
Think of You Again as A Portrait of the Artist as a Not-so-young Woman, on a shelf that would include Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs — but with the addition of a mystery as a compelling chaser.