About two years ago, while doing some drunken book shopping with Surya at City Lights Books in North Beach, I stumbled across Chris Adrian's second novel, "The Children's Hospital," and was completely fascinated with the story. A kind of Noah's ark, but with a hospital and set in modern times. I wish I could say that I've completed the book, but I haven't...yet. It's fat and dense and completely interesting.
But my ever-changing, ever-adapting taste has moved to reading more short story collections at the moment since that's the kind of project I'm working on now. I started writing poetry in my younger days, moved to flash fiction, then right on into full novel-length manuscripts when I realized my poetry was pretty awful. So when I found myself, yet again, doing some drunken book shopping at City Lights, I stumbled across this collection of Adrian's that I'd never heard of before. I pulled it off the shelf, read the back, and immediately bought it.
Adrian is a bit of an odd duck; not only is he a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, but he is also a doctor now finishing up a pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at the University of California in San Francisco. This is all to say, the guy is no slouch and his writing shows it. Even when he brings up a lot of medical terminology (which I have zero clue about), it feels natural and essential to the story rather than bogging down the text, which I appreciated immensely. The jargon added to the stories; it never hampered them.
I'm envious of Adrian's imagination; it's far out there and certainly pushes a few boundaries, much in the way I like to think my own writing aspires to do as well. While there was almost an overbearing relation to the events of 9/11 in some of the stories, I didn't seem to mind (even having just read DeLillo's "Falling Man" right before, itself an entire novel based around the events of that day eleven years ago).
Even with his obviously elevated educational pedigree, Adrian comes at the reader in a simple, but fantastic, way. It would be easy for him to slather on the thesaurus-worthy verbage or use entirely too large phrasing to make the same point, but he avoids this and it's to his credit. A 26-page story reads like a fraction of that length and still packs the right amount of punch. These stories ride that fine line between dark and twisted, never really venturing too far off to either side, but stradling each perfectly without the possibility of alienating the uninitiated reader.
What struck me the most about each story was the foil each main character seemed to have with them. In the title story, "A Better Angel," the son of a dying father is followed around by a kind of mythical conscience/guardian angel from an early age. She attempts to keep him on the "right" path, but as he ages and their relationship continues, she reveals that not all people with angels turn into good people. But she is always there, always playing against him and he against her.
"Yet awakening lust wasn't the problem, though eventually the lust that awakened made me a monster and a fiend, and I would waste, and still waste, half my life in thrall to it, screwing whoever would hold still for me in high school and forever beyond, to the exclusion of work and food and sleep, but never of drugs."
"The Sum of Our Parts" was an absolutely beautiful execution of moving from character to character to character and getting into each mindset before flowing into the next through action and dialogue. It's a technique I've always wanted to try myself and Adrian absolutely nails it through the interactions of hospital lab techs and their inner desires for each other. Imagine a room full of sexual tension where no one is attracted to the people they want attracted to them...all while under the supervision of a woman having an out of body experience, waiting to die.
Of all the stories in the collection, however, I think "The Changeling" had to be the most disturbing of them all. A son, a father, and a grandfather living in the same house. After an accident, the youngest son seems to be inhabited by a "chorus of voices" that bite at and snap at the father. What is an obvious story about demonic possession becomes a much deeper tug-and-pull until the final scene where the father proves to the demons inside his son exactly how far and how deep the love for his son actually is. I worried that I'd be turned off by this one, having seen or read about other possession/exorcism style stories, but I was hooked until the end. None of the standard cliched nonsense of floating beds or children puking or screaming at the caregivers, just flat out good storytelling with tension being heightened appropriately along the way.
These are just three of the stories that really stood out for me, but the entire collection is phenomenally solid. Had I not been on vacation when I started (and finished) it, there's a very good chance it would have taken me two days, tops, to finish. Adrian's prose style is fluid and truly moves across the page in a very readable, yet vibrant, way. This will be one I recommend to anyone looking for some new reading by someone they may have never heard of.
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It occurs to me that I should be commenting on your posts, so here goes. We spent so many nights at City Lights, on so many different occasions that it's hard to keep track of all the stuff we've sifted through. I vaguely remember you buying this, and am glad you liked it. It seems right up your alley. But I wonder, as I read your post/review, what is Adrian exploring by writing these stories? What are the larger themes he wants us to consider? Do you like him because he writes strange tales in a highly detailed manner? Or is there some larger purpose, i.e. linguistic, social, socio-political, etc. he means to explore? I do believe that the modernist/post-modernist "project" was every bit as reductionist as its predecessor, Positivism and the scientific project of reducing all phenomena into things that could be known and thus controlled. That changed with Henri Bergson, then Freud, later Jung and, in linguistics, Saussure. Husserl's phenomenological idea posited a world not independent of the viewer and the viewed, that "bracketing" of experience, object, person, etc. he wrote about seldom considers the larger totality, least of all context. As proto-existentialist, Nietzsche was hugely important then, decrying the death of God and declaring superman as the measure by which to create a new morality in the absence of a Judeo-Christian creed. That's when Sartre found currency in literature and Camus' existential novels revealed that man didn't need God, that he was the measure of all things. Terribly liberating, but it could lead to a new kind of psychological parochialism, that there is right and good and that view is my right and my good, leading to, perhaps, solipsism. Maybe that's a slippery slope (and it is), but that doesn't deny it's relevance as an argument. The dadaist movement denied all conventions as artificial, denied history, refashioning culture with a view towards nihilism and so what was left when even art was dead? Post-modernism of the 70's is characterized by refusal, denial, rejection of what? Authority, convention, system, structure. New works were still created. By new I am not sure I mean novel. And the post-post modernism of the twenty-first century is what exactly? Influenced by technology? Check. Influenced by the idea that at the center nothing cannot hold? Check. But that seems to me a reversion to modernism and a reaction to it. Freud revealed that we are more than just what our conscious, logical minds tell others we are. We are driven by unconscious drives. Dream logic has its own network of associations and combinations of meaning which the French symbolists, Mallarme, Tzara, and artists like Dali and Picasso exploited. So what is Adrian's project? What is he doing that hasn't been done before? Is his work a dream logic? A nightmare logic? Lastly where do characters fit in? Are they simply puzzle pieces, treated as word choices in a masterful word game (I am thinking of Wittgenstein)? Should we treat them as such? Dig deeper into the text and discover what it is his work attempts to question (not answer, because I believe that texts should only raise deeper questions), and then let me know.
ReplyDeleteall good questions, but i'm not trying to get too academic with my reviews. i get about 10 people who actually read my posts...the rest is all fluff - outsiders looking for pictures of libraries (that post gets a full 30% of my total page views for the blog) or people looking at my analysis of Nolan's Batman franchise for pictures (nearly 20% of the total page views for the blog).
ReplyDeletehaving said that, i really just read the book for the pure enjoyment of it and not to create an in-depth analysis of it. especially since i was on vacation for most of the time reading it.