This is one of my all time favorite books. It has a funny, touching, haunting story about memory, the stories we tell ourselves and what it means to love. ( )

Spilling Clarence is the thought-provoking first novel by Minnesota native Anne Ursu. A small midwestern college/factory town is affected by a psychopharmaceutical drug that wafts through the air during a fire at the factory. People recover all the memories they have either repressed or lost during their lives, good or bad.

Ursu shows the effects of this forced reminiscence on an interesting three-generation cast of characters, all the while causing the reader to ponder how this would affect his or her own life. Why do we forget? Are some things best forgotten? What about the things we don't want to forget?

Wonderfully original, humorously entertaining-- a strong first novel for Anne Ursu. Well worth the read! ( )

Ursu has a knack for creating a completely ridiculous scenario that turns out to be completely serious, and she writes it so you completely buy into it and are very concerned about the characters and their plight. This pivotal event in Splling Clarence is a psychopharmaceutical chemical spill that unlocks peoples' memories. The book is a fascinating study in memory and how we desperately *need* to forget things and suppress certain memories just to be able to function on a daily basis. More than that, though, this book is a character study of several people with troubled pasts and troubled presents. The effect of the unlocking of the memories provides a way of getting to know each of the main characters. Ursu does this with flair and with writing that proceeds in a variety of quirky textures. The most rewarding part of this book, in my opinion, is seeing what effect an extended encounter with their pure past has on what the characters will do with their futures. ( )

This was one of the most melancholy books I have ever read. While it was well written and most of the characters were well drawn - I found it lacking the depth that her follow-up - The Disapparation of James displayed.

I still believe that Ursu is one of the most exciting new authors I have read in a while - but the relentless tone of this book made it hard to read. ( )

After I finished reading Anne Ursu’s novel Spilling Clarence, I promptly forgot about its events and characters. This doesn’t bode well for a book whose plot hinges on memory. Not the sudden loss of memory, but the unexpected remembrance of things past.

The trouble with Ursu’s novel is it’s too easy to forget. It’s the equivalent of fogged breath on a window. You can practically see this little patch of a book shrink, fade, vanish.

It’s too bad, really, because Ursu (making her debut here) casts a pleasant, rhythmic spell with her words and the story certainly has potential. Unfortunately, neither plot nor language rise above the ordinary.

Spilling Clarence is about….is about….

—Um, can you excuse me for a minute? I need to refresh my memory.

[whispery riffle of turning pages]
[soft groan of brain cells rousing and getting back to work]

Ah yes, here we go…now I remember. Sort of.

Spilling Clarence is about the aftermath of an accident at a psychopharmaceutical factory in Clarence, Minnesota. The town and the drug released into the atmosphere—deletrium—are fictional, but the ghosts of Love Canal and Three Mile Island are never far away. The odorless deletrium wafts across Clarence, seeping into brains, firing neurons and releasing memories in every resident. This is okay if you’re only nine years old, but what if you’re seventy-nine and must cope with everything from first loves to the horrors of Auschwitz (not to mention having to relive bad-fashion eras like the 70s)? Understandably, the elderly population takes the accident pretty hard, some of them succumbing to catatonia.

For the most part, characters sit around anxiously fretting over the home movies playing in their heads. Pages and pages of crying jags, sleeplessness and lethargy later, the reader begins to wonder at the sanity of the town’s residents. Few, if any, do the logical thing: move out of town at least until the cloud of deletrium dissipates.

I suppose I shouldn’t expect logic from a story like this. It is, after all, a fairy tale—or, more accurately, one of those quirky-town movies we like to call “dramadies.� Ursu’s pen skips lightly across the page, breezing through the plot with characters the thickness of paper dolls. Most of them seem to be wearing demeanors clipped from your average Anne Tyler novel.

Ursu’s omniscient voice—the novel’s strongest suit—is like a roving camera going down the elm-lined streets, peeping behind curtains, interrupting breakfasts. We eavesdrop, but we never really get to know (or love) these poor memory-fraught folks.

It’s been more than a month since I finished Spilling Clarence and the only person I can recall with any accuracy is Madeleine, a novelist in the twilight of her life who must cope with memories of an unsatisfying marriage to a husband long dead. Madeleine is warm and personable, but as for the rest—her freshly-widowed son, his precocious daughter, a young unhappy woman, her workaholic fiancée—ah…fuhgeddaboudit. ( )