SCREENING ROOM

A family death sends a celebrated author back to his boyhood home in Memphis, Tennessee, where many family members and memories await.

Theoretical physicist and novelist Lightman (The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, 2014, etc.) had left Memphis as a young man, telling us later in this emotional, moving tale that he had vowed never to move back. The reason: the assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King Jr. Race is a principal character in this unusual, even eccentric, memoir. Although Lightman writes that he invented some characters and lightly fictionalized some episodes, he frankly confronts the ugly racial history of Memphis—and of his own family (they had a black housekeeper). His grandfather and father had owned and managed major movie theaters in the area (the author worked in one as a teen), and Lightman recalls how his father quietly and slowly integrated the venues with very few problems. The author’s organization is a bit like a photo album. There are many short segments beginning in the present tense (which he uses to record his monthlong sojourn at home); he then shifts to the past when something in the present serves as a trapdoor to drop him into the past. Along the way, we meet siblings, quirky aunts and uncles, and cousins. We explore the history of Memphis and some of its notables (including Elvis, whom the author met). About the only Memphis moment of consequence he does not mention is its use as the setting of John Grisham’s The Firm (and the subsequent Tom Cruise film). The cumulative effect of Lightman’s memories is wrenching: Loss and illness and death wander freely in his pages, reminding us of the evanescence of youth and promise.

The author shows us many small moments, igniting each with sparks of passion, memory and intelligence.