18 October 2013 THE IMPOSSIBLE KNIFE OF MEMORY by Laurie Halse Anderson, Viking, January 2014, 304p., ISBN: 978-0-670-01209-1 

"She laid down the receiver beside the phone and walked out of the room.  The voice went on talking.  She came back into the room with a cleaver in her hand.  With the cleaver she sliced through the connection, where the wires came out from the wall.  The voice ceased."

-- Abigail Tillerman's reaction when the Army calls and tells her about her son Bullet, who was fighting in Vietnam.  From THE RUNNER (1985) by Cynthia Voigt, Book 4 of the Tillerman cycle.

"Ooooh, war, has shattered

Many a young man's dreams

Made him disabled, bitter and mean

Life is much too short and precious

To spend fighting wars these days

War can't give life

It can only take it away"

-- Edwin Starr, "War" (1970)

"'Sleep tight, princess.'  Dad's face was half in shadow, angular and old-looking.  I wanted to sit on the ground next to him and lean against his knee and have him smooth my hair back and tell me that everything was going to be all right, but the awful thing was, I wasn't sure it could be.  He was sober, still drinking soda, surrounded by guys who understood everything he'd been through, but his good mood of the afternoon had vanished.  He looked lost again, haunted."

Laurie Halse Anderson dedicates this book to her father, a WWII veteran.  THE IMPOSSIBLE KNIFE OF MEMORY is the story of teenager Hayley Kincain who has grown up dealing with the mess that is her father, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq who, thanks to what he experienced while serving, is unable to live a stable, sane life.  (Actually, the guy rarely makes it through a stable, sane day.) 

Hayley is a young woman who has spent her formative years at risk because of what war has done to her father.  After five years of relative isolation, being "home schooled" while crisscrossing the country alongside her father in his eighteen-wheeler during what would have, otherwise, been seventh through eleventh grades, Hayley and her father have now moved back into the house in which her father was raised -- the house in which Hayley used to live when she was little -- and Hayley is spending her senior year attending the public high school.  Hayley has clearly learned a lot academically during the home schooling years -- which tells us something of who her father was before War ground him to bits.  But Hayley has necessarily blocked out a lot of memories from years of stressful living and, because of having to worry every moment about her father's violent, unpredictable behavior -- fueled by the unimaginable scenes of horror that play in his head while alcohol and drugs course through his veins -- things at school don't go all that swimmingly well for her.

Fortunately, Hayley meets another "weird, quiet, and strangely smart" victim of explosive family collateral damage -- Finnegan "Finn" Ramos -- and it is their complicated relationship that is both central to this story and the counterpoint to the horror shows playing out at their houses.

Laurie Halse Anderson's novels are always leavened with good doses of insight, sarcasm, and insightful, sarcastic humor.  This one is no exception:

"I was not a totally ignorant feral recluse.  Watching Animal Planet had alerted me to the existence of mating behavior.  Plus, having eaten a lot of bologna sandwiches in truck stops, I'd heard the kinds of things that grown men say to other grown men about these issues."

Anderson's peppering the story with swipes at our failure to adequately fund education, and her revealing our failure to provide substantive support services for veterans like Hayley's father -- and for the damaged kids of these damaged adults -- begs the question of what one is supposed to do.  When there is no support from outside, and family members with no training seek to keep other family members who are dealing with serious issues from drowning in their stuff, does this mean that they "enabling" them (a seemingly negative thing) or "taking care of each other" (a seemingly positive thing).   

"'What's an unreliable narrator?' asked Topher."

THE IMPOSSIBLE KNIFE OF MEMORY begins with Hayley explaining to us that there are only two kinds of people in the world: zombies and freaks.  I was really intrigued by the manner in which Hayley sets forth this view of the world, and I was really satisfied by how the notion of zombies and freaks comes 'round again at the conclusion.

Peace, y’all.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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