The Way Through Doors: A Novel
by: Jesse Ball
Published by: Vintage Book
Buy From Amazon.com
Reviewed by Janelle Martin
“It is book of delight–a love song of the imagination sung by a young man for a young woman who has lost her memory.” – Jesse Ball describing The Way Through Doors (at The Elegant Variation)
Selah Morse, a recent recruit to the Seventh Ministry, is walking past when a young woman is hit by a speeding taxi. He rushes her to the hospital where he discovers that in addition to having lost her memory, she is without identification. An unexplainable urge possesses him and when asked by the doctor, he poses as her boyfriend and names her Mora. Charged with keeping her awake for the next 18 hours, and assisting her in recovering her memory, Selah passes the night telling her stories.
If you’ve read Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball’s first novel, then you are already familiar with the convoluted narrative methodologies he employs. The basic plot merely provides a narrative framework for his wordplay.
Ball’s new novel is the literary equivalent of Russian nesting dolls, stories nestled within stories that continually twist back upon themselves. Readers are led to question the veracity of statements made by Selah as each alters slightly with subsequent retellings.
In a novel where nothing is as it seems and readers continually search for narrative certainty, the writer’s ability is critical. The author must craft prose that sings, carrying the readers along in its wake through sections devoid of all frames of reference. Ball handles words like a master and his delight in language oozes from the page.
As Ball says in the quote at the beginning of this review, The Way Through Doors is a “love song of the imagination sung by a young man for a young woman who has lost her memory.” Yet I would argue that it is a love song of the imagination sung by Ball expressing his love for stories. The way he views narrative is expressed most clearly by one of his characters in this quote: “Events are continuous, not broken, and they never move on. Stories tell themselves one to another, over and over, never ceasing, and we skip here and there…”
Armchair Interviews agrees.
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