This novel about a woman's descent into neurological illness exposed the troubles of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy, yet still connected.
A son helplessly watches as his mother sinks into the mysterious depths of an unknown illness. His efforts to understand her gradual deterioration lead him to reach out to his estranged brother, a neurologist, to learn all he can of the disease. Yet medical science is as powerless as philosophy to help them comprehend what is happening to her and to them, to explain the relation between brain and mind, between memory and selfhood, between heart and soul. The narrator, distrusting the usual explanations for his mother's tragedy, begins, dangerously, to lose his own bearings, as he senses how deeply his family - and life - have been transformed.
