I just finished The Memory Police, and I’m trying to understand my reaction to it. I loved the premise and the atmosphere at the beginning, but by the halfway point I felt like I was reading the same scene over and over again. Things disappear, the characters have essentially the same conversation about emptiness or “filling the cavities of the heart,” R insisting that they will remember, the protagonist worries about everything disappearing and the old man saying it will be alright… To the point that I basically skimmed through the last 100 pages.
It made me wonder whether the book would’ve landed much more powerfully as a short story or novella. The central metaphor is strong, but it felt stretched very thin across a full novel, almost as if the emotional arc never developed beyond its initial idea.
Has anyone else felt this way? Or did the repetition and stillness work for you in a way I might’ve missed?
Would love to hear different perspectives
by Burgundy-Bag
1 Comment
Agreed on all points. Great premise and dreamlike atmosphere but didn’t have much else to sustain an entire book. Also hated the subplot of the manuscript the character was writing, I feel like the main story didn’t have enough depth to give time to the story that basically had the same metaphor.
Charlie Kaufman is a great screenwriter and is supposedly adapting this, I think it has potential to make for a great film but I wasn’t a fan of the book