What does it mean to see yourself only through the eyes of others? Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s gripping new novel is a deceptively straightforward story of amnesia, betrayal, and forgiveness in which the narrator, having suffered a concussion, has lost all memory of himself. Joe knows how the world works—he can Google, buy cigarettes, recognize accents—but he has no idea how he fits in.

Various characters provide Joe with his biography, but Joe doesn’t recognize them anymore. How can he believe anything they say? Even his wife is a stranger. Describing the home he was taken to after the hospital, Joe’s bewilderment is palpable: “I don’t remember seeing this house before the afternoon I was brought here by the woman claiming to be my wife, with whom I now share a bed. She assures me I’m the father of three children, our children, presentable, unobjectionable children, I thought when I first saw them.” 

Among the first things Norah tells Joe is that he’s the star of Crime City, a popular noir TV series. Joe can thus study himself onscreen as a hard-boiled detective whose own past is never revealed. Norah assures Joe that off-screen, he’s “rather easygoing,” his life nothing like the tough detective’s. But Joe is living inside a detective story, one in which the stakes may be higher than in a classic whodunit. Simultaneously victim, detective, and possibly villain, Joe must follow a series of clues to recover his identity, and what he finds could prove repellent.

There’s a lovely wryness to Joe’s voice which offers a clue to who he might have been, but along with that wryness is a profound sense of helplessness. Norah, the woman claiming to be Joe’s wife, shows him photo albums proving their relationship, but as far as Joe is concerned, she could be a clever stranger who abducted him. One of the triumphs of this novel is that, although the reader can see the illogic of Joe’s fears, Joe remains completely understandable, a kind and intelligent man who is simply and desperately lost. Even after Joe decides he has no choice but to believe Norah, after he comes to love the children he doesn’t remember raising, he is hardly on solid ground. Still, he takes some comfort from the evidence that he was a decent man. “I must have been a good father,” he says. “I must have a soft heart.”

Every night, after the children are in bed, Norah offers Joe more details about his life. He comes to think of these as Norah’s “bedtime stories,” a phrase that put me in mind of Scheherazade, though here the listener’s life is on the line, because the stories Norah tells will determine whether Joe is the innocent he feels himself to be. He is, in a sense, on trial with himself. Although many of Norah’s stories are innocuous, even positive, she also describes behavior that shocks and disgusts Joe. Joe’s twin sister and an old friend likewise reveal terrible things he’s done. Look at what you really are, they seem to say. This unveiling of Joe’s dark side is the live wire running through the narrative. He sees himself as “a figure emerging from the fog,” wondering in horror if he had been “the kind of boy who delighted in torturing weaker boys.” 

A poet as well as a novelist, Schwartz studs her prose with small, striking details. It’s through these fleeting sensory perceptions that Joe begins to heal. Early on, he feels an itch in his throat and realizes he’s a cigarette smoker. This recognition gives rise to his first—and for a long time only—memory: “I remembered so vividly how it felt to light up and hold it between my fingers.” When he and Norah make love, he recognizes her “familiar sounds,” and Norah bursts into tears: for a moment, Joe is back. In one of the novel’s most stirring scenes, Joe awakens at night to hear his son practicing the clarinet: “I was mesmerized by the sounds,” Joe says, “as if were trying to awaken something in my brain, the way a dream drifts away so fast but sometimes leaves a clue, a sound or image, or something even more evanescent.” The music triggers a memory of childhood, which in turn unlocks more vivid memories, tumbling one after the other.

Had Schwartz stopped here, A Stranger Comes to Town would remain a satisfying read, a compelling exploration of the nature of memory, full of risk and redemption. As terrifying as Joe’s experience has been, it also offers him the a to change—and it is just here that Schwartz complicates the picture. Healed and able to atone, Joe discovers he’s still capable of betrayal. That’s the gut punch. 

For more than fifty years, Lynne Sharon Schwartz has been dazzling readers with tense, highly readable stories that contain buried explosives. Schwartz, who has won major awards in multiple genres, once described her earliest childhood writing as “poetic speculation, partaking of all the genres and bounded by none.” Though she has learned the rules of form, she has lost none of her original genius. She is still poetic, still speculative, still unbound.   

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Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of thirty books of fiction, essays, and poetry, including her novels Leaving Brooklyn, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Rough Strife, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also published two memoirs, Ruined by Reading and Not Now, Voyager, and has translated from the Italian. Schwartz has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts in Fiction and, separately, for Translation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She has taught widely, most recently at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the Columbia University School of Arts.

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Abigail DeWitt has published several novels, most recently News of Our Loved Ones.