The roman à thèse lives. It is a fine art to move about a fictional world and have the character's life choices remind readers of their own choices made in the actual world. It is an even finer art to do so without sounding earnst, preachy or smug. Jane Rule possessed that art with The Young in one another's arms. She continues to posses it with Memory Board.

She weaves a narrative out of the simple acts. The story's fabric is shot through not so much the inner monologue of remembering and forgetting as with one monologue's collisions with another. Rule can make the awkward silence stick to the page. It is worthy of observation as the shuttle moves between the stretched threads.

Take for instance the musings of Diana, a retired doctor and the woman in love with Constance, watching her nephews at work:

But these two had been allowed to grow up without the fact of war, instead with the threat of such a war that there would be no place for death-defying heroic fantasies, and they seemd to her gentler, more domestic creatures than her own generation had been, not soft, no, but their strength given to mending, moving, making things. They were great docile beings who conferred authority on their elders as if it were a gift from them rather than a yoke the young were forced to bear.

By the point these wise words appear in the novel, there has been much meditation upon the body and its movements. There has also been the sharp insistance that the relationship between the two women is not a marriage. There has been the slow insistance that the fallout of war lasts well beyond the signing of an armistice but that we cannot, or rather should not, blame the past. Strength in the mending, moving and making of things becomes special. The gift is not grandiose and therefore all the grander.

The genius for observation is heroic.