Twelve degrees of separation

In this ingenious debut novel, a teenager traces the sufferers of a rare genetic disease

The Story of Forgetting By Stefan Merrill Block Faber Pounds 14.99

The Story of Forgetting is a debut novel by an American writer with more than literary ambition at stake. Stefan Merrill Block has invested his family's health in this book. His subject, Alzheimer's, has waged what he calls a "slow, unsparing warpath" across generations of his family, returning its sufferers to the children they once were. But, conversely, Block's genetic curse has given him material that is overflowing with meaning and vitality.

I'll put money on the fact that The Story of Forgetting will win prizes, top bestseller lists and shift by the lorry-load. It's a triumph of a novel, a fact that's all the more astonishing since it's the first attempt by a man still in his twenties, who had been shooting wedding videos for a living.

Fifteen-year old Seth, tormented by acne and unattainable girls, is dimly aware that his mother, Jamie, is becoming absent-minded. A visit to the local Mongolian Grill forces him to accept that "forgetfulness" has outlived its usefulness as a description of her state of mind. While other diners select cuts of meat to be sizzled into char-grilled perfection by the chefs, Jamie economises on the grilling stage and crams the plump, raw flesh into her mouth. Later, when the Alzheimer's has encroached even further, she lugs around a suitcase packed with rotting meat long since removed from the haven of the fridge.

Jamie's eventual diagnosis is early-onset Alzheimer's. It arrives unbidden at the age of around 35. The variant of the disease that Block gives to Jamie is EOA-23, caused by a single rogue gene on the 14th chromosome, and is entirely the author's invention. The device that plays perfectly to Block's plotline is that each sufferer of variant EOA-23 is, at most, the 12th or 13th cousin of any other victim.

Seth, using the teenage boy's lethal weapon of computer hackery, plunders the database of the leading scientist in the field. He plans to map out his mother's opaque family history by talking to as many sufferers of EOA-23 as he can find. The only fragment Jamie has ever disclosed about her life, though, is that as a child she learntof a magical land called Isidora, in which no one remembers anything and so dreads nothing.

The incremental creep of Alzheimer's pushes Jamie back to childhood. As she retreats, Abel, an ageing and solitary hunchback living hundreds of miles away, reflects on his life. Abel's farm, once remote, is being insistently devoured by the sprawl of Dallas. He owns a decrepit horse, a heap of decaying furniture and a volume of stories about a land called Isidora.

It isn't difficult to anticipate some of the eventual outcomes of this novel, but this inevitability is not to its detriment in the least. The tales of Isidora that pepper the narrative are reinvented, reinterpreted and reborn endlessly, just like the fatal gene on the 14th chromosome. The Story of Forgetting is a book fizzing with creativity and ingenuity. Science and imagination unite to form a double helix of glorious finesse.

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