...one of the most curious and moving love affairs in contemporary fiction ... The book examines the nature of passion, affection and, above all, the loneliness that permeates even the longest and most intimate relationships.
Early on, we learn that E.H. has a flattened affect, 'as a caricature is a flattened portrait of the complexity of human personality.' In confining her search to the realm of darkness and depravity, Oates has flattened the potential complexity of her own novel.
We mainly see Margot’s 'doomed and deranged love' from her perspective, but Oates occasionally allows for an outsider’s take. It’s those little glimpses that balance Margot’s intensity and remind us that inner turmoil is often invisible to the world at large. As Oates examines how memory affects our perception of the past and shapes our present and future selves, she also weaves an engrossing love story.
By this stage of her career, Oates understands character and structure in her very bones, and here she builds her prose around the qualities of memory loss ... [she] is canny and devastating in how she unveils a universal experience from the unique dynamic of her leads.
Oates’s narrative inhabits Margot’s interior life for most of the book, and particularly in the book’s protracted focus on the day-to-day work in the lab and its near-case notes nature, the story drags a bit in its first half through repetitiveness that’s probably a bit too authentic to methodical science to make for scintillating reading. Surprisingly, The Man Without a Shadow really picks up steam when Oates goes inside the damaged mind of Elihu Hoopes, which in her rendering is a fascinating place.
The Man Without a Shadow is strongest at highlighting the consequences of this professional despair across decades, how Elihu is cruelly and unwittingly used as a pawn for both professional ladder-climbing and emotional solace. Margot is a brilliant but lonely woman who resents her mentor, but she can’t help modeling his behavior. But how Oates strains to keep this story together!
