As Canadian writer Douglas Cooper's first novel Amnesia begins, the nameless narrator, an archival librarian in Toronto, is surprised by a visitor to his office on the morning he is to be married. The visitor, disreputably dressed and carelessly groomed, introduces himself as Izzy Darlow, and proceeds to tell the story of his life, his troubled family, and his many crimes. Izzy alternates his life story with the story of a mentally disturbed young woman named Katie.

As the narrator listens to Izzy's confession, he realizes that he will never marry. The fiancée conveniently disposed of, the novel focuses on the tormented Izzy and hapless Katie. Yet we cannot help but wonder why the narrator lets Izzy ramble on, and what is the meaning of Izzy's enigmatic and portentous pronouncements. Soon after he enters the narrator's office, Izzy comments on a quote from Freud the narrator has framed on his desk: "The mind is like a city." "The analogy is important," Izzy says. "It is the clue to everything." "The smallest part of this tale," Izzy claims, "contains within it, like a hologram, the beginning, middle, and end."

It gradually becomes apparent that the novel is a carefully constructed puzzle based upon Freud's analogy as elaborately developed by Mr. Cooper, and that Izzy Darlow is none other than the youthful version of the narrator himself. Izzy is clearly described as the narrator's reflection: "Izzy sat facing me, in a chair that was the mirror image of mine … My hair, however, was parted on the left and Izzy's on the right. Viewed in plan, the room was symmetrical about the axis that divided the desk between us."

The narrator suffers from amnesia, presumably because of trauma: "I underwent something, which left me with an emotional burden too great for the conscious mind to bear." In other words, on the morning of his wedding, the narrator is surprised by his younger self, who brings him, in fragments, the lost memories of his past, which he must piece together.

Izzy is the middle son of three born to a secular Jewish family. His father, a real estate developer, is "a paragon of openness and civic loyalty." His mother, on the other hand, is "unfathomable." His older brother Aaron is a renegade and a tyrant, a teen-aged Dr. Frankenstein who, in the laboratory of his room, builds a machine with which he plans to bring a dead puppy back to life. Instead, Izzy gets trapped in the circuitry and suffers a shock which seems to split him in two.

The youngest brother Josh is described as an angelic innocent, eloquent in spite of a disfiguring lisp, who sings of prophetic visions of destruction and can intuit his brothers' dark deeds and desires. He takes solitary nocturnal walks through the city, and Izzy, who follows him on his circular route, hears him speak of a mysterious Katie.

The Darlows live above a chaotic ravine where dogs mate with wolves, and thieves wander at large. Katie's family lives in a house built right into the ravine so that her room cantilevers out over it. As an adolescent she is visited by a mysterious stranger, who leaves her bits of green plants and violates her despite her trust in him. As a result of this rape, she loses the ability to read and to speak and becomes hysterical. Eventually she is confined to the mental ward of the Jewish hospital.

Izzy has nothing but contempt for the safe, acceptable Judaism practiced by Toronto's bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, he accedes to his maternal grandfather's wish and agrees to study Hebrew and have a bar mitzvah, the Jewish ceremony in which a boy of thirteen leads the Sabbath service and assumes the religious obligations of a man. While he is preparing for his bar mitzvah, he begins his career as a thief. He steals not for gain, but for the thrill of committing a crime. He falls in with a gang of law-breaking hoodlums, who ironically call themselves the Friends.

Izzy is a self-styled young Nietzschean contemptuous of his fellow citizens, who despises the quality of niceness. "It is the barrier between a society and heroism," he proclaims. His bar mitzvah is a travesty that ends in tragedy and death. In his role as accessory in the Friends' biggest crime, he unknowingly robs himself of his inheritance.

Izzy's relationship with his fellow student Margaret is a battle of will and subjugation, which ends in her suicide attempt. It resembles his later relationship with the damaged Katie, whom he meets at the hospital and rejects when she desperately needs him. The mysterious perpetrator who raped Katie, it is implied, was that part of Izzy who was split off in Aaron's experiment.

The "hologram" which holds the meaning of the story seems to be the reductive version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, retitled Ophelia, which Izzy observes being performed in an abandoned subway station and takes part in. Both Katie and Margaret represent aspects of Ophelia, the girl who goes mad and the suicide. Izzy represents hamlet, the confused, tormented, bookish philosophy student, incapable of love, who seeks "the unravelling of the maternal secret." Yet, in fact, Izzy is a caricature of Hamlet, without Hamlet's appeal, nobility, or morality. He has no murdered father to avenge or usurper to destroy.

"Something about this story makes it want to replicate, breed inwardly like cancer," Izzy proclaims, not once but twice. In this solipsistic novel, symbols and images constantly suggest themselves. The city is like the mind: the unmapped ravine is the unconscious, and the changing skyline and multiplying streets represent consciousness. The Darlows' duplex house, never entirely joined and made whole, is another image of the mind. The three brothers seem like split-off aspects of a single, damaged man.

Other symbols will suggest themselves to the reader. Mr. Cooper has constructed an intricate novel. Yet the sensibility which permeates it is so unpleasant and the symbolism so heavy-handed that the novel becomes both tiring and tiresome to read. The story disintegrates under the weight of the meaning it must bear. Mr. Cooper demonstrates that the difference between the portentous and the pretentious may be very slight indeed.