ALL THE WORDS WE KNOW

A woman with dementia struggles with a host of dangers, external and internal.

Nash’s protagonist, who may or may not be named Rose, enjoys clicking down the halls of her elder care facility with her walker, cheating at Scrabble with her best friend, and chatting with a man who doesn’t really live there. As she looks at the photos on the whatsitsname, she remembers the time her first husband tickled their children’s feet (that was before his head somehow got cut off) and the time she met the older fellow who sat with her in the garden and told her he loved her. She gets served tea by the Peruvian or Bessarabian girls. The Scare Manager, assuring her that change is good, “transitions” her to a smaller room with a view of the parking lot. People disappear. As Rose struggles to communicate her fears to her family, granddaughters Charity and Felicity twiddle their thumbs on their smart phones. Nash depicts Rose’s inner world skillfully, putting in her mouth a hilarious litany of malapropisms each time she tries to describe something she sees, or thinks she sees. And he makes sharp fun of the corporate doublespeak her caregivers use to excuse their egregious behavior. But traversing the mind of this most unreliable of narrators may sometimes make readers feel like Rose herself wandering the halls of her care facility, struck by memories that are more evocative than meaningful. Rose eventually bests the fraudsters who run her old-age facility, but it’s less clear whether she can triumph over her the inevitable aging of her own faculties.

An inventive look at the battle between all the words we know and all the words we no longer know.