DISSOLUTION

With shades of Philip K. Dick, a dystopian novel that probes the darker corners of the mind.

Stanley Webb is in a bad way, as so many of his age: He’s in a memory ward, sinking into dementia, leaving his wife to tend single-handedly to a house that’s too large for her. Maggie—the true hero of Binge’s involving novel—is the second person to speak in the story; the first is a disembodied voice that announces, “I’m Hassan. Do you remember me?” Hassan offers an unsettling thought: Stanley isn’t suffering from Alzheimer’s, but instead, holed up in a nursing home cheerily called Sunrise, he’s having his memories selectively harvested. Someone is looking for something, that is, and that something goes all the way back to Stanley’s school days, when a mad-scientist tutor recruits him and two other teens, Raph and Jacques, into a secret project that’s designed to expand their memories—for, as Stanley brightly puts it, “If memory is what makes us human, then surely being able to remember more makes us more human.” Soon enough Stanley, competing with his friends, is memorizing pi to the thousandths of places, memorizing Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet is an important leitmotif—and learning all about the concept called the apeiron, which, Stanley hazards, is “kind of like whatever existed before the big bang.” Fast-forward to an adult future, and it’s now Jacques’ turn to play the role of mad scientist—mad with a bent toward some very apocalyptic ends and, as he assures Maggie, quite prepared to “roll Stanley in here and slice open his throat in front of you.” Time travel, mass extinction, the end of the world: It’s all here in a storyline that twists and turns like a spacecraft in a wormhole, rocketing toward an unforeseeable and unresolved ending.

A nimbly constructed story that starkly explores the dangers of neuroscience run amok.