The snow started to fall several hours before her labor began.
The opening line of the novel is deceptively simple. What seems to be a prosaic and even mundane conditional description is actually subtly filled with potential meaning. The idea of driving to the hospital to deliver a baby in the snow is alternately endowed with both romanticism and danger. Falling snow can create the sense of nostalgic dreaminess under certain conditions while it can also presage an extended experience of feeling trapped and incapable of escape under other conditions. In this case, of course, snow is also the unexpected intrusion of fate which forever alters the fate of the course of that romantic assignation which had taken place nine months previous.
A classic case, he remembered his professor saying as they examined a similar child, years ago. A mongoloid. Do you know what that means? And the doctor, dutiful, had recited the symptoms he’d memorized from the text: flaccid muscle tone, delayed growth and mental development, possible heart complications, early death.
Nine months later, the wife gives birth and it is the husband who is forced by the emergency conditions of the snow to deliver the baby. Except that, unexpectedly, it is not just the delivery of a single infant. His wife had been carrying twins and the second baby through is much smaller, a girl and afflicted. The mother will know she delivered twins, but she won’t learn that both survived until much later. It is the consequences of this rash, morally-abusive decision which guides the narrative through its tragic swirl downward to an almost inevitable conclusion.
She thought of the camera, its precise dials and levers. The Memory Keeper, it said on the box, in white italic letters; this, she realized, was why she’d bought it—so he’d capture every moment, so he’d never forget.
The title is broadly allusive. It refers specifically to the camera which the wife has given to her husband. Naturally, any memories recorded by a camera also refers to the person who has taken the photograph. The irony, of course, is the allusion to the husband as the memory keeper is related to the fact of the two, it is only he who has any real genuine memory of the daughter also referenced in the title. The wife’s memories are false, instilled by a shameful, cowardly lie which the husband has also never been allowed to forget.
What he had asked of her—that she take his infant daughter away without telling his wife of her birth—seemed unspeakable. But Caroline had been moved by the pain and confusion on his face as he examined his daughter, by the slow numb way he seemed to move thereafter. Soon he’d come to his senses, she told herself. He was in shock, and who could blame him? He’d delivered his own twins in a blizzard, after all, and now this.
The baby girl has been delivered and immediately identified as being afflicted with Down’s Syndrome, casually referred to at the time by now-abominable term mongoloid. The rash decision is made: charge his nurse—for the husband is an orthopedic surgeon—with maintaining a lifelong vow of silence and with the duty of getting the child to a proper institution capable of dealing with such birth defects. The husband’s rashness and moral cowardice fail to take into consideration, however, that not all the world is created from the same psychological mold. The rare arrival of heavy snowfall in town has been the determining agent of fate which has kept the obstetrician from arriving, forcing the orthopedic surgeon into a medical emergency not within his purview. Before that, however, fate had unknowingly intervened when the doctor had hired a nurse whom he could never have predicted would wind up raising his daughter rather than following his orders. And, as the saying, this changes everything.
He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable.
David's specialty as a bone doctor gives insight into his personality because it shows that he yearns stability and order in his life. Bones are described as "solid and predictable" which parallels his methodical personality and his lack of spontaneity. Additionally, the intentional detail of bones surviving in the heat of cremation shows that bones, much like David, remain methodical and withdrawn until the very end, even in the face of adversity. While bones can be interpreted as a symbol for David, bones also represent David's family. A major part of David's job is watching bones break and mend themselves back together. Much like the bones, his family also broken by the "death" of Phoebe, as her "death" caused David and Norah to drift further apart. The whole premise of the book follows how David and Norah try (and fail) to mend their family back together. In this way, bones are not only his career, but also represent his life.
Now and then when she went into an office in Lexington, Norah would find a photo, anonymous yet eerily familiar too—some curve of her body or a place she had visited with David, stripped of its original meaning and transformed: an image of her own flesh that had become abstract, an idea.
The photographs of Norah and her body being “stripped of its original meaning and transformed” are a metaphor for Norah’s life. She is unable to fulfill the role of being Phoebe’s mother, something that has caused her a lot of grief and hardship. However, what she doesn’t know is that this role was stripped away from her by David himself. Because she does not know this, she does not see David as the cause of their grief and the cause of their distance brought about by the differing ways in which they cope with the loss of Phoebe. Instead, she tries to bridge the gap between her and David by understanding the way in which he copes with the loss of Phoebe, which is photography. However, when she becomes involved in his photography, she realizes that they are not growing closer, but rather, farther apart. She realizes that he doesn’t see her as herself, but merely as a subject to be photographed. David is so consumed by the loss and regret of giving Phoebe up, that coping with this loss consumes him, rather than moving on.
