Bizarre may be the best one word description of this novel by a Chapel Hill, North Carolina emergency room physician. After a multiple murder at a kids play date, the one surviving six year old boy is admitted to a psychiatric ward. The lives of the boy, an emergency room physician and a 99 year old reclusive woman, all living in the same Rhode Island community, become entwined in complex ways.
The work-related stories told by the female E.R. physician are very realistic (probably based at least in part on the author’s real life experiences) and brought back vivid memories of my days as a physician often dealing with sudden unpredictable emergencies. I suspect that for non-physicians, her description of her work life would be enlightening and enjoyable. She tells a trainee: “Medicine will take everything you have to give, and some days you will have to give it everything. …. no matter how much you love it, medicine will never love you back.”
The writing flows naturally like a slow river, but one with swirling eddies in the time flow. Themes of loneliness, endurance, hope, and even futility prevail. The characters all seem to abandon their deep Catholic belief in any better life hereafter as they accumulate many cruel losses in this one.
But-and it is a big but- I found it impossible to follow any reasonable time line to the story, which seems to extend from about the 1930s to at least 2018, but in jumbled disorder. Appropriately, the chapters in which the elderly hermit relates bits and pieces of her life history are much longer than those relating to other characters. Like the Muriel Parkinson character in a Terry Fallis novel, she is witty and sprightly.
This book, gifted to me, is going to the Willam’s Court lending library, as it is not one to take up any of the limited space on our shelves.
Thanks,
Andra via Cratejoy.
The Passionate Reader 