Summary:

When Rupert Darley, a twice married writer and teacher, shows up unannounced at his elderly parents’ home in rural Southeast England for a weekend, having just left his second wife, he has little reason to suspect that it will be the eventful weekend that it is. In only 170 pages, he is joined by his medical student daughter, Miranda (also called Milly), whose visit to her grandparents is expected by them but not by Rupert; he must come to grips with the harsh realities of aging, most especially that of his suddenly quite old and frail parents, whom he calls by their given names, Oliver and May; he and his daughter discuss for the first and most honest time their lives and those of their family; and they all must deal with the crisis of sudden unannounced illness.

Oliver is a well known architect who is stodgy and well aware of his eccentricities, tolerated but not allowed free range by May, his arthritic wife who is probably stronger in spirit than Oliver. The four of them discuss - jointly and in various permutations of groupings - a costly stair lift for May, Rupert's marriages and current (extended) mid-life crisis, Oliver's quixotic project to build a huge pyramid city complex, the vicissitudes of aging and approaching death (which is the elephant in the parlor in this book), health, illness and societal change.

Of interest to literature and medicine readers, Milly has frank conversations regarding end of life choices, to Rupert's initial dismay, with both grandparents individually and accompanies Oliver to the hospital in an ambulance when he has a heart attack at the end of the book.

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Vanya and Uncle Nicolai, two orderlies in a morgue, are preparing for funeral the body of Trepov ("Known everywhere simply as Trepov" (63), a hated officer because of whom "more [Russian] people were murdered than absolutely necessary." Trepov is the pawn of "the Little Father" (64); both very well may be cruel administrators of an invading force, not necessarily Russians themselves, although this is not clear.

What is clear is that Vanya, the younger orderly, despises Trepov. After finishing the dressing of the cadaver in military finery, replete with "all those gilt-enameled medals" (64). Vanya suddenly closes the door, to Uncle Nicolai’s bewilderment. Even more surprising is Vanya’s determined slapping of Trepov’s face three times. With tacit approval from Uncle Nicolai, Vanya then kicks Trepov. Finally, Vanya slaps, with all his strength "the corpse’s face again. Now we can go, he stammered, his face flushed with the thrill of it." (65)

Vanya goes to bed thinking about the son his wife is expecting (since there was no ultrasound between 1908 and 1912 when Csáth most likely wrote this story, this detail remains mysterious) and how he will boast to him about "that day’s doings." And then he falls fast asleep, "breathing evenly, deeply, like all healthy people" (65).

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Summary:

Twain paints a picture of an all female family of four: Margaret Lester, widow; her 16 year old daughter, Helen; and Margaret’s extremely proper twin maiden aunts, Hannah and Hester Gray, aged 67. It is a household in which "a lie had no place. In it a lie was unthinkable. In it speech was restricted to absolute truth, iron-bound truth, implacable and uncompromising truth, let the resulting consequences be what they might." With this background, Twain sets up a perfect scenario of hide-bound morality only to turn it on its head, an iconoclastic trick for which he is deservedly well known.

The doctor caring for the mother and daughter, suffering from typhoid, cuts the aunts’ pietistic morality about lying to shreds, demonstrates the shallow logic and inconsistency of it and predicts they will lie in a greater fashion than they can imagine. True to form, Twain has the aunts go to great lengths to falsify the condition of the critically ill daughter to the mother to prevent the truth from worsening her condition. The title derives from the final lines of the story when an angel of the Lord comes to their house and delivers the judgment for all their lies, a judgment the reader is asked to guess: Was it Heaven? Or Hell?

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Summary:

This posthumously published short (132 pp) collection is by a former New York Times book reviewer and essayist who was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in 1989 and who died the following year. Broyard responded to his illness by writing about the experience. The book is comprised of six parts:

Part 1: Intoxicated by My Illness

Part 2: Toward a Literature of Illness

Part 3: The Patient Examines the Doctor

Part 4: A Style for Death: Journal Notes, May-September,1990

Part 5: The Literature of Death

Part 6: What the Cystoscope Said

Parts 1, 2 and 5 appeared in slightly different form in the New York Times between 1981 and 1990.

Parts 2 and 3 are in part from a talk Mr. Broyard gave at the Univ. of Chicago Medical School in April 1990. Part 6 is a short story written by Broyard in 1954 about his father’s death.

Mr. Broyard had long been fascinated with death and dying, before his prostatic cancer, publishing "What the Cystoscope Said" in 1954, some 35 years before his own diagnosis. It is as though he had been preparing for what he knew would be his finest work. Always an engaging essayist and reviewer, Mr. Broyard here offers what he did best--a discursive (in the best sense) soliloquy on disease, suffering, the majesty of the educated, reflective person with illness--all amplified with widely ranging withdrawals from the broad literary bank account one would expect of a professional reader and reviewer: one reads about personal fate vis-à-vis D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love; one reads, as one can read nowhere else, about illness, dying and sexuality and its relevance to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

Part 1, Intoxicated By My Illness, is a personal statement about the effect of this illness on Broyard’s attitude and is rich with his own and others’ literary sense of how he should and did react to it. Part 2, written later than Part 5, deals with literature and illness as opposed to the emphasis on death in Part 5. Within Part 2 are references to Susan Sontag, Norman Cousins and Siegel, among other students of this subject. It is interesting to compare the more powerful and personal and moving appeal of the later writings on illness (Part 2) to the more abstract, critical ruminations on death (Part 5) at a time when, in fact, Part 5 was a literary exercise. Part 2 is written with the pen of the heart.

Part 3 is a wonderful account of Broyard’s first meeting with his personal physician. While Broyard analyzes this man, he reflects on what he would like in his ideal doctor. Part 4 is a brief (7 pages) collection of short diary entries reminiscent of Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings. Part 5 includes essays on death and dying in literature and what these books, e.g., Robert Kastenbaum’s Between Life and Death and David Hendin’s Death as a Fact of Life and Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, have to offer us.

Part 6 is a short story about his father’s death, the son’s sexual escapades and the relationship between the two. Clearly sex, death and their nexus have long been on Broyard’s mind. This is a welcome reflection and is of interest more as it compares to Broyard’s later writings on the subject, especially in Part 2, than for its intrinsic worth as a short story.

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Summary:

Bertie Shields, a second year college student, and Joyce Renfrew, a nurse, are conveying the body of a dead elderly woman to the morgue. After a brief lustful look at Joyce, whose plumpness does not go unnoticed or uncommented upon by either Selzer or Bertie, the latter averts his eyes to the leaner cadaver, going from "pubic woolgathering" to ribbon-spotting; for he notes with increasing meditative pleasure that the corpse is wearing a bright blue ribbon, tied in a small bow and sitting "at the side of her head like a butterfly." (p. 122)

Bertie waxes reflective, wondering who put the ribbon in her hair and when. Joyce, who looks thirty-five to Bertie and who has "heard about" Bertie from "one of the other girls", begins making verbal and then physical advances as they approach the morgue. Just as he has put the unnamed cadaver on her tray and is proleptically about to "slide the tray home," Bertie’s last sight of the cadaver as she is entering "the dark recess" is the "winky blue . . . "--a sight that goes unfinished as he feels Joyce’s hand on his buttocks. The inevitable happens, of course, on the now vacant stretcher.

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Written in 1944 and first staged on January 3, 1945 with Richard Basehart and Anne Burr and Earl Jones as Basuto, The Hasty Heart grew out of the playwright’s experiences in an ambulance unit on the Burma front in World War II. The play was made into a movie in 1949 (with Richard Todd and Ronald Reagan) and was revived on Broadway in 1984.

The Hasty Heart concerns, initially, six characters in a British General Hospital in the rear of the Assam-Burma front: a nurse (Sister Margaret--"Sister" is a British term for a nurse; she is not a religious--and five Allied patients: Kiwi (a New Zealander), Tommy (a Brit), Digger (an Australian), Yank (an American), and Blossom (an indigenous Basuto) who understands and speaks no English, an important fact for later developments in the play.

Patrick introduces us to Sister Margaret and the five original patients who are, for all their good-natured bickering and nationally directed gibes, clearly a cohesive unit characterized by the camaraderie of an in-patient ward with residential patients. For instance, Tommy, who is chronically kidded about his obesity, claims to be proud of it and accuses Digger of being jealous about Sister Margaret’s giving Tommy therapeutic back rubs.

Enter Colonel "Cobwebs," the medical officer. He solicits the group’s help and cooperation in keeping a new patient "contented." It seems the Colonel has just successfully removed a patient’s kidney damaged by shrapnel only to discover that the soldier’s remaining kidney is "defective." The wounded soldier, Lachie, a Scottish Sergeant, will therefore die in only six weeks of uremic poisoning. The Colonel has "decided against telling him" since "[W]orry won’t help him."

The Colonel tells the men and Sister Margaret that "The only help anyone can give him now, [sic] will come from you." When Yank asks, "And he thinks he’s well, sir?" the Colonel replies, "In a sense--he is. But it would be criminal to release him just to collapse up forward. Do what you can to keep him contented--and happy."

With the arrival of Lachie, an incredibly difficult, abrasive and unfriendly Scot with pathological chips on both shoulders, the scene is set for "an archetypal story about friendship under fire." [Mell Gussow as quoted in a 1984 NY Times review in the obituary above, op. cit.] Despite all their earnest attempts at striking up a friendship, the other patients find themselves rebuffed, often quite rudely, by Lachie. Eventually, at the insistent urging of Sister Margaret, they are successful. A birthday gift of a complete Scottish highlander outfit touches Lachie who admits that he’s never had friends and is, to no reader’s deep surprise, a truly lonely man.

Near the end of the play, the Colonel, following orders, tells Lachie his diagnosis and prognosis, and his superiors’ desire for Lachie to return home, despite his wishes to remain with his friends, in order to become a military hero to be honored before his death. Lachie understandably retreats into a shell of resentment, blaming the men for treating him with pity instead of friendship. Eventually things right themselves and the play ends happily.

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The unnamed narrator recalls--he hesitates to use "this ghostly verb" (107) in the presence of Funes’s memory, in every sense of the word--the dialogue he had with Funes, a young man from Fray Bentos (in present day Uruguay), "a half century ago," (111) as an invited written dithyramb in his memory.

The narrator’s initial encounter with Funes, a tough living and working on a ranch, was to hear him give the time, in the middle of the afternoon, immediately and accurately as an innate skill. Later, when the narrator inquired what had become of Funes, he was told that the latter "had been thrown by a wild horse at the San Francisco ranch, and that he been hopelessly crippled" (109). It is at this point that the saga of Funes the memorious begins.

When the narrator visits Funes to recover some Latin texts the crippled and housebound Funes had requested, he enters to hear the autodidact Funes reciting from memory the section of Pliny’s Natural History relating to memory. For Funes, with only these texts and a dictionary, has learned Latin and memorized the texts. In fact, Funes, as a result of his injury, has learned to live in the present, a present that "was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories" (112).

His memory is so precise, so individual in detail that he develops a unique numbering system and that "in a very few days he had gone beyond twenty-four thousand" (113). Funes had ascribed to each number from 1 to 24,000 a unique name so that, "In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez [italicized in original]; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train [italicized in original]. . . . In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine [italicized in original]" (113). In mathematical terms, Funes had treated each number as a prime, a unique integer without relation to other unique integers.

The narrator points this out to Funes, i.e., that "this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. . . . Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me" (113). [The reader would do well to remember that the Spanish for "rhapsody" is "rapsodia" and thus suggests "rhapsode," a singer of the Homeric poems, poems written by a blind story-teller (like Borges), and poems that required prodigious memories to recite.]

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Summary:

A poem of five sonnets reflecting on the poet's discovery of an asymmetry in his breasts requiring a mammogram. The resultant diagnosis, gynecomastia, is the source of flippant "nervous humor," as McClatchy describes it in a section on the authors and their poems at the end of this anthology (pg. 265), followed at the end of the poem by a "darker, more serious meditation" (again in the poet's own words). The meditation is not so dark or abrupt that it undermines the poem's integrity.

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Summary:

Celia Gilchrist is an editor in London who is in her thirties waiting for the right man. She meets Lewis, clearly (at least clearly to everyone else in the novel and the reader but not, typically, to Celia) a cad and a womanizer. About the time she realizes this, she receives and accepts a job offer in Edinburgh where she promptly meets Stephen, who is separated from his wife, Helen--a Helen as elusive and mysterious as the Helen of Troy, and also as powerful to affect the lives of others, especially men--and their nine-year-old child, Jenny. Despite Celia's valiant effort to get to know and accept Jenny, Celia and Jenny do not get along. From the very first chapter, which is a flash-forward, to the last page, Celia encounters accidents, lies, damage to her personal property, from dresses to sweaters to jewelry--all when Jenny is in the vicinity. The ending is cataclysmic.

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Set sometime in the near future, Cast of Shadows has as its protagonist Davis Moore, a successful private practice physician specializing in cloning human babies for infertile couples. Early in the book, Anna Kat, his high school senior daughter, is murdered and raped. (For a while a likely suspect is Mickey the Gerund, a right wing extremist member of the Hands of God with a fascinating grammatical moniker never explained, who shoots cloning physicians, including Dr. Moore, in the abdomen, a short time before his daughter, Anna Kat, is brutally killed. However, Mickey is only a shadow of a suspect and quickly becomes supplanted by another much more likely villain. Mickey goes on to kill, by various methods, dozens of cloning physicians and staff by book's end.)

After a year of unsuccessful detective work, the local police return Anna Kat's belongings, including a plastic vial with the suspected murderer-rapist's semen. In an act never fully explored by Dr. Moore or the author, an otherwise rational and ethical physician surreptitiously uses the suspect's semen to fertilize a married woman patient.

The offspring, a clone of the suspected killer-rapist, is Justin, who becomes a formidable presence in the book. He is very intelligent--at his psychologist's advice, his parents provide him at an early age with advanced reading materials like Plato (hence one of the allusions to shadows, i.e., Plato's cave, in the book's title and referenced directly on page 118 and indirectly on page 208) and other philosophers. By the time he is a senior in high school, Justin has become a dominant player in the affairs of Dr. Moore; Sally Barwick, a private investigator-turned journalist; and the suspected killer-rapist--his origin of the species as it were.

This book has a number of subplots all of which radiate from the initial cloning and the various members of the extended family and professional staff involved in it, some knowingly, most not. There are narrative threads involving the suspected murderer rapist-now-prominent attorney, Sam Coyne; the triangle of Dr. Moore and Jackie, his alcoholic wife, and Joan, his attractive pediatrician associate; Mickey the Gerund's various murderous and obsessional religious activities and reflections; Justin's life in school and involvement with Sally Barwick's investigation of a serial killer called The Wicker Man; and, most especially, the development of Shadow World, a computer game and a virtual replica of the real world--the world as Justin, Sally, Sam Coyne, and Dr. Davis Moore know it.

Since this is a thriller, it would be inappropriate to divulge more of the plot, which is intricate, often a little far-fetched but always engaging, highly readable and more labyrinthine than most medical thrillers.

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