Business of Memory

The ""commodification"" of personal memory as literary memoir in an age of computerized, artificial memory is Baxter's guiding theme in this collection of essays, the most recent entry in the Graywolf Forum series. Sylvia Watanabe, winner of a 1991 O. Henry Award, revisits in memory the Honolulu of her childhood and recalls the complicated poetry of insects' names learned from her father, an entomologist. Both Margot Livesey and James A. McPherson note St. Augustine's dictum that memory has more to do with soul than mind. Livesey's elegiac prose traces her search for her father in others' memories in hope of linking them to her own forgetfulness, for ""what we do not remember, we are doomed to repeat."" Patricia Hampl writes of sitting in a rocking boat on the Mississippi in sight of St. Paul, bemoaning that because ""memory is a cheat,"" she has lost ""quite a few people, not to death, but to writing"" stories of her life that others read as ""betrayals."" Editor Baxter's staccato style cannot rescue his own essay from the burden of trying to communicate too much; in it, a recurring theme is of ""information-poisoning"" and crashing computer memories. Singly, these 13 essays are often engaging and occasionally quite inspired, but taken as a whole, the collection is disjointed and doesn't amount to more than the sum of its parts. (May)