THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 59
phrase out of the fact that Josie’s
mother always drinks coffee swiftly in
the morning—“the Mother’s quick
coffee.” When Klara is taken for a drive,
she marvels that cars would appear on
the other side of the road “in the far
distance and come speeding towards
us, but the drivers never made errors
and managed to miss us.” She inter-
prets a block of city houses thus: “There
were six of them in a row, and the front
of each had been painted a slightly
different color, to prevent a resident
climbing the wrong steps and enter-
ing a neighbor’s house by mistake.”
When Klara hears Josie crying, the
cracked lament is novel to her, and she
renders it with naked precision: “Not
only was her voice loud, it was as if it
had been folded over onto itself, so
that two versions of her voice were
being sounded together, pitched frac-
tionally apart.”
The pathos and the interest of her
misapprehensions are deepened by
her proximity to us: she’s like a child,
or perhaps an autistic adult, looking for
signals, trying to copy. As in “The Re-
mains of the Day” and “Never Let Me
Go,” Ishiguro has created a kind of
human simulacrum (a butler, a clone)
in order to cast an estranging eye on
the pain and brevity of human exis-
tence. Pain enters the world of this
novel as it does ordinary life, by way of
illness and death: Josie suffers from an
unnamed disease. Klara had noticed, at
their first meeting at the store, that
Josie was pale and thin, and that “her
walk wasn’t like that of other passers-by.”
We learn that Josie had a sister, who
died young. When Klara first hears
Josie sobbing in the night (that folded-
over sound), the teen-ager is calling for
her mother, and crying out, “Don’t want
to die, Mom. I don’t want that.” As
Josie begins to decline, we realize that
Klara was selected to be the special
kind of AF who may be required to
comfort a young, dying human, and
one who may uselessly outlive her
human mistress.
What sense can an artificial intelli-
gence make of death? For that matter,
what sense can human intelligence make
of death? Isn’t there something artifi-
cial in the way that humans conspire
to suppress the certainty of their own
extinction? We invest great significance
BRIEFLY NOTED
In Memory of Memory, by Maria Stepanova, translated from
the Russian by Sasha Dugdale (New Directions). This remark-
able account of the author’s Russian-Jewish family expands
into a reflection on the role of art and ethics in informing
memory. After the death of an aunt, Stepanova examines fam-
ily lore and heirlooms that hint at how the family largely sur-
vived the atrocities of the tsarist and Soviet eras. She probes
gaps in her knowledge, and—drawing on artists and writers
including Charlotte Salomon and Marina Tsvetaeva—con-
siders how memories are perpetuated and manipulated. Ste-
panova is both sensitive and rigorous, writing that she was
“smitten with the idea of blindly retrieving and reliving scraps
from my life, from a collective life, rescued from the shadows
of the known and accepted histories.”American Baby, by Gabrielle Glaser ( Viking). In 1961, Marga-
ret Erle Katz, an unmarried teen-ager, gave birth to a son she
named Stephen. Her story anchors this book, an indictment
of forced adoptions in mid-century America. Threatened with
juvenile detention, she was coerced into surrendering her baby
to an adoption agency that lied to adoptive parents about
where the babies were from, and to birth mothers about where
they were sent. Shame, and a closed adoption system, discour-
aged Katz from looking for her son, and it was not until he
started researching his ancestry that, in 2014, a relative was
able to connect them. As some states unseal birth records,
millions of Americans are still seeking their biological par-
ents—victims, Glaser writes, of a system in which in order
“to create one family, another had to be disintegrated.”Cathedral, by Ben Hopkins (Europa). Set in Germany, this am-
bitious début novel begins in 1229, when a young serf buys
his freedom and becomes an apprentice stonecutter, working
on the construction of a cathedral. “It will be made of the
mortal Stuff of this World,” his master says of the project.
“But it will point, in all its stones and mortar, to He who laid
the cornerstone, the foundations of the Universe.” As the ed-
ifice rises and decades pass, Hopkins weaves together a mul-
titude of voices to examine the relationship between medieval
worship and the era’s politics and economics. The resulting
epic is both sweeping and human.The Weak Spot, by Lucie Elven (Soft Skull). This fable-like novel
takes place in an unnamed town at the top of a mountain, ac-
cessible only by funicular, and near woods where, centuries ago,
beasts were said to roam. The narrator is a pharmacist-in-train-
ing, alienated from her family, who arrives to work for an im-
perious, mercurial man named Mr. Malone. Watching him
absorb the complaints and confessions of his customers, she
begins to imitate him, learning to enter their minds “like a
contortionist threading her fillet of a body through her arms.”
This process, along with Malone’s subtle intimidations, leads
to the erosion of her identity. Hints of trauma begin to flicker
through the novel’s dreamlike surface, as the narrator attempts
to keep her feelings “as still as possible.”