There is something both foolhardy and fearless in a 33-year-old author attempting to get into the head of a couple with a 30-year relationship history. But this is exactly what Chapel Hill's Rosecrans Baldwin does - successfully - in his debut novel, "You Lost Me There."
Dr. Victor Aaron is a 50-something distinguished neuroscientist working on understanding and treating Alzheimer's disease at a research institute in Baldwin's lovingly evoked Mount Desert Island, Maine. His wife, Sara Gardner, a playwright and screenwriter, has died recently in a car accident, but has left behind a series of confessional note cards.
The content of the cards shocks Victor, because Sara narrates a life with her husband profoundly different from the one he remembers. Victor's task throughout the novel is to come to terms with this disconnect.
"You Lost Me There" thus develops into an extended meditation on (mis)communication and (mis)perception in relationships - on, in fact, the unsettling reality that, regardless of who you are and what you know, seeing eye to eye is a daunting proposition.
Those closest to Victor elaborate this theme: his off-again, on-again girlfriend Regina, a scientist, poet and burlesque dancer; Lucy, his research partner, who speaks in elliptical half-sentences; the annoying and adorable Cornelia, his friend Russell's 22-year-old, steak-eating vegan, wannabe chef daughter; Aunt Betsy, a vinegary old Yankee dame who drinks, smokes, and tells it like it is; and Joel, her brilliant and troubled restaurateur son.
Some of this will be tiresome to those uninterested in WASPy, Ivy League angst (how can you not be happy as a distinguished anything?), but in the end even skeptical readers can be won over by Baldwin's assured take on the truth that - regardless of how old we are - we are all searching to be understood and loved.
