Black Arts & Culture Feature:
- Lynne Sharon Schwartz uses spare, prosaic language to explore memory loss and fractured identity through Joe Marzino’s amnesia.
- Joe’s profession as a television actor lets him perform versions of himself while uncovering unsettling truths about his past.
- Fragments of memory and revelations—family secrets, adoption, historical trauma—complicate redemption and self-reckoning.
- Schwartz frames the novel as an Odyssean moral journey toward confession, penance, and possible transformation.
Reviewed by Catherine Parnell
A Stranger Comes to Town
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Eastover Press
October 2025, ISBN: 958094633, 208 pages
A Stranger Comes to Town, a welcome novel by the acclaimed multi-genre writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz, neatly and prosaically captures what happens when memory is T-boned and identity bleeds out. The nature of accidents is that they’re just that, accidental – like being struck by a bicyclist in this case, but the incidentals and accidentals pile up after Joe Marzino suffers from total amnesia. Because of his head injury, he longer knows who he is – or who anyone in his life is – and as he rebuilds he also faces unsavory revelations about the man he once was.
A Stranger Comes to Town follows Schwartz’s collection of essays, My Life at the Wheel (Delphinium Books, 2024), in which we learn that she doesn’t see her life as a “continuous line” but as a series of knotted and linked experiences that interrupt one another. This fascination carries into A Strangers Comes to Town (and yes, we all get the cosmic joke) as Joe learns who he was, only to be interrupted by who he is. As his wife, Norah, says, “’Look, I hate to throw everything at you at once . . . ‘” In response, Joe runs through what he does remember (AIDS) and thinks, “Amnesia is debilitating too, but hardly life threatening. There isn’t any life left to threaten – it’s gone. . . And still it feels shameful.” The impact of not knowing strikes with force harder than the bicyclist.
Post-accident, Joe limps through the novel, desperately seeking the words to accompany his version of “Song of Myself.” His role as a television actor who plays a detective – he retains his acting chops – enables him to slide into the skin of who he was, and with the help of his wife, Norah, he navigates now-unfamiliar territory. But the revelations are sharp and shattering: a twin sister who covered a crime for him, a father with a mysterious work life, an adopted daughter whose parentage upends his journey to his former identity. He finds he is not who he’d like to be, but are any of us? We wrestle with fate and folly and often come up as fools. Joe is no different, yet he searches out the one thing that will save him from himself, and that’s recognition of another sort.
Schartz’s prose dazzles as we accompany Joe on his sleuthing. Early in the novel, he considers people seen from his apartment window: “Lots of people looked respectable, but weren’t, and how did I know this? From childhood, somehow. And what did respectable mean anyway? For all I knew I’d spent time in prison.” He’s not wrong, and without knowing it, he’s talking about different kinds of bars, a prison built on broken commandments – and while his memory may be lost, his karmic senses quiver with awareness.
Snatches of memory return, providing clues to Joe’s life of old, from personal losses to 9/11. Of the flood of information, Joe says, “I could barely believe I had lived through all this and forgotten it. Too much to forget. Or else too much to remember.” There’s inquisitive wariness to Joe’s character, and the reader roots for him even though some of his misdeeds are enough to – as we often see in social media – unfriend and block him. But Schwartz crafts a character whose villainous behavior is coupled by self-disapprobation, and we root for the guy.
Deep within the novel is the possibility of soul-saving redemption through confession (not necessarily Joe’s either), penance and the discovery of a self that can be a better person. Lynn Sharon Schwartz is at the top of her game in this book as she guides us through an Odyssean journey of shipwrecked memory.
About the reviewer: Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit and serves on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in Reckon Review, Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.
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