Book Essay on The Forgetting Time

Author's Note: This was written for a school project.

“The Forgetting Time,” written by newcomer Sharon Guskin, is a 2016 mystery/drama novel that follows (initially) three different paths: the paths of disconnected Janie, her son Noah, and a lonely mental illness-diagnosed man named Jerome. With no father present, Janie is left to raise her four-year-old son on her own, which is all the more troublesome when Noah is seen to have developing memories that are not his own: facts on a specific type of rifle, information on Harry Potter books that he has not read, and, above all, the claims that he wants to go home. Janie’s and Jerome’s fates seem have to been unstoppably connected at this point, as they spiral toward an inevitable meeting, where it is diagnosed (albeit unofficially) that Noah has possessed memories from a previous traumatic life.

We then are introduced to another character in the spectrum: Denise, a grieving woman who has been overcome with loss, depression, and loneliness after her 9-year-old son Tommy disappeared without a trace years ago. After a disastrous encounter with the woman, Noah (who believes Denise is his mother at this point) runs out into the town, and soon finds himself in front of Paul Clifford, of which Noah finds himself familiar with; “Why’d you do it though, Pauly? I don’t know why,” he asks the ruined, alcoholic young adult, who is soon snapped out of his hungover stupor when he recalls an act he’d rather forget, one that never should have happened. He remembers the day when, after a mean-spirited conversation with his father, he tried to demonstrate the workings of his father’s rifle to a little boy named Tommy, only to accidentally have a bullet ricochet off of a bucket directly into Tommy’s chest, killing him soon thereafter. After Noah confesses what happened, and explains the location of his body, Paul is convicted, and Denise finally accepts all that has happened. The other characters have their own epiphanes, too (I’ll get to this later), and all end up accepting themselves and the world around them.

Before diving into the characters, the setting must be evaluated first: while not a major selling point for the book, it still plays an important role. As a part of the whole reincarnation theme, the topic of whether or not the place in which the deceased come back to life is intentional or not is played around with. For several of the documented cases that Sharon Guskin put in between the chapters, the subject ended up only miles away, and could describe the place very clearly, making it seem that the location does, in fact, play a role. But, without these small, intricate details, the setting doesn’t play that much of a role (though, with Guskin’s amazing sensory detail, the visual locations do actually become very appealing).

Onto the meat of the novel: the characters. The always-developing, deeply-layered characters. First off is Janie: at first her recollection of past events seems to emanate a sense of longing, seclusion, and, overall, melancholy. But, near the end, her final epiphany has her suddenly realize how everything (and everybody) is connected; whilst on a subway car, a homeless man shuffles around, which draws her attention to and away from the other passengers, noticing little details about them, and thinks to herself that one could possibly be her deceased mother, or friends, or someone she has met before. She realizes that all of us share a profound connection, and that everybody must understand that.

Jerome, on the other hand, has his revelation right at the end, just as he lets himself go for the first time. As a past intellectual scholar, he had always put himself under immense pressure and work, leaving little to no time for other activities (all to the dismay of his deceased wife, who still managed to support him, until her death). While on a sandy, foreign beach, he self-proclaimedly lets himself go, letting the water (and the brain disease that eats away at his language) drift him away. Other character developments include Denise’s and Paul’s, which, respectively, include accepting the fact that her son is dead, and that people have to be forgiven.

There are quite a few messages and themes to take away from “The Forgetting Time.” One, which is arguably the strongest out of all of them, is the theme of the interconnectedness of all things; what binds us all together. On Janie’s subway car ride home, she seems to take us all along on a wondrous revelation. To experience it, here’s a passage from the scene: “Maybe she’d been related to someone in this very subway car. Maybe that guy with the suit and the iPad. Or the Rasta chewing gum. Or the blond man with the polka-dot shirt and the fern sticking out of his bag. Or the woman with the bristly hair. Perhaps one of them had been her mother. Or her lover. Or her son, the dearest of the dear. Or would be, next time around. So many lifetimes, it stands to reason that they were all related. They’d forgotten, that’s all. It wasn’t a hippy dippy campfire song. (Well, okay, it was, but it wasn’t just that.) It was real. But how was that possible? It didn’t matter how. It was.” Here, Janie accepts the binds that connect all of us, whether we like it or not. It is a hard way to live, loving everybody you meet, but, dang, is it worth it.

Though less of a theme and more of a philosophy, the topic of reincarnation is also brought up quite a bit. Not only that, but it is proven that Noah is a true reincarnation of Tommy, and that he will always have a small piece of the lost child within him. Something always seems to tie back to something, which the novel really seems to want to get across, and it did so terrifically.

“The Forgetting Time” is a magical meditation on what has happened, what will happen, and being able to accept what has happened. Its characters fully encompass this with their own stories of self-discovery: Janie realizes everything is connected, Jerome lets himself free from the binds of the things around him, Noah learns to live, Denise learns to cope, and Paul learns to accept. All is one, and one is all. To end with a quote from the book, here is a bit of writing from Janie’s final discovery: “His face seemed to spring forward, his needs and hopes etched clearly there, as if he had been waiting all this time for her to notice him.”