`The Full Panoply of Speech'

This word-drunk writer, who described purple prose as “the style of extreme awareness,” suffered a stroke in June of 2003 that left him with global aphasia, the loss of speech both spoken and written, its expression and comprehension. The stroke killed cells in the Broca’s area (speech production, language comprehension) and the Wernicke’s area (language comprehension) of the brain. His wife, writer Diane Ackerman, calls his condition “the curse of a perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory hunt.” Rather than resign himself to the limbo of the language-less, West laboriously composed a memoir, The Shadow Factory, parts of which have been published in The American Scholar, and has also finished writing his first post-stroke novel. To place the accomplishment in perspective, imagine Dr. Oliver Sacks writing one of his portraits in applied epistemology from the point of view of a patient who has suffered a neurological catastrophe. Here’s a triumphant excerpt: