Memory Wax

the long version

In Memory Wax a husband's unfaithfulness unleashes the quasi-mythic violence of his wife's bloodiest imaginings. Somewhere between her thoughts and her deeds the reader stands witness to the knowledge that doing justice to one's own experience entails the most grotesque transfigurations. Delta Tells, the eloquent protagonist of Singer's novel, testifies to this belief in a riveting succession of scenes which pit her against the intimidations of an intractable physical world: the sexual indifference of her husband, the physical jealousies and recalcitrant organs of the women to whom she ministers as midwife, the gravity of her own troubled motherhood, and the authorities who suspect her of committing an unimaginable crime against Nature. Delta's telling of this crime is meant to be the unravelling of anyone who might believe it. And so the husband's desperation to test the truthfulness of his wife's vengeful tale begins to loom as a portentous question about how we gauge the limits of our experience - sexual, intellectual, emotional - or whether any such limits apply.