The Strange Case of Jane O.

Starred review from October 7, 2024
The mesmerizing latest from Walker (The Age of Miracles) is a fantastical tale of a mother’s mysterious visions and memory lapses. Psychiatrist Henry Byrd is called to a Brooklyn emergency room after Jane O.—a single mother who was found unconscious in Prospect Park, with no memory of what happened during the previous 25 hours—requests him by name. As Jane was Byrd’s patient for just one session, he’s surprised to be summoned. But when she tells him about a vivid hallucination of a middle-aged man who she knew as a teen before he died decades earlier, and who gives her an elliptical warning to “get out of the city,” the details capture Byrd’s attention (“A hallucination of extended duration, not just a brief flash of something unreal, is more alarming in terms of prognosis,” Walker writes). Jane is also troubled by her amnesia—she ordinarily has perfect autobiographical memory, or the ability to remember every incident of her life to the smallest detail. Byrd grows increasingly fascinated by Jane, and when she disappears for days after another apparent fugue state, he throws himself into investigating a diagnosis more mystical than anything found in the DSM-5. Jane’s story unfolds in sections structured alternately as Byrd’s clinical notes and her own journal, which takes the form of letters to her infant son. As Byrd’s tone becomes more confessional, the narrative opens up an alluring vision of how personal history and memory intertwine. This one is tough to shake.