[The impossibility of accurate memory is dealt with] in the increasingly surrealistic account of The Changeling, which retreats altogether from the public realm into a self-indulgent phantasmagoria of privacy. The ambiguities of its plot reflect its explicit insistence on the hopelessness of attempts to know. Pearl, the protagonist, twenty years old at the outset, has trouble discerning meaning in her experience. "Nothing in her life had prepared Pearl for significance. Each moment that occurred lay mute within her, a buried stone, contained from and irrelevant to herself, an event with neither premonition nor consequence." Moreover, she cannot remember properly…. Pearl's interest in story creates the protean shapes of [her past]. Around her, others invent, remember, enact disturbing stories. Her own life follows a plot whose outlines she cannot grasp…. She lives with her husband's brother and an ever-changing collection of children on a strange island. She does not...