Summary:

Jacob, a teen with Asperger's syndrome, has long been obsessed with the details of crime scenes and crime detection.  He tends to show up when local crimes are reported, and is sometimes able to offer unnerving insights to forensic analysts.  He works closely with an empathetic, intuitive young woman tutor whose controlling boyfriend has more than once tried to taunt Jacob out of her life, but she and Jacob have a strong, healthy connection that ridicule can't touch.  When she is found murdered, Jacob becomes a suspect, partly because of his proximity to the crime, and partly because the symptoms of Asperger's-avoiding eye contact, twitching, and hesitant or repetitive speech-resemble guilty behavior.  Though he has valuable information to offer as to who actually committed the crime, the process of making himself heard by those disinclined to take him seriously and uninformed about his syndrome, takes time, during which the disrupted lives of those around Jacob, especially his mother, become stories in their own right.

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In 1974, a student befriends Pärssinen, the gardener of his apartment complex in the town of Turku, Finland. Pärssinen invites him to drink and watch pornographic movies from his extensive collection. One night when both are full of alcohol, the gardener stops a girl on a bicycle, rapes and strangles her, and tosses the body in a lake. The drunken student is a baffled witness. The body resurfaces several months later, but the case is never solved. Her name was Pia.

More than thirty years later, in 2007, another girl, Sinikka, goes missing. Her bicycle is found with traces of her blood right beside the memorial shrine to Pia at the place of her murder. The retired cop, Ketola, is convinced that solving this new crime will also solve the old one.

At the same time, far away in Helsinki, Timo Korvensuo and his wife are entertaining friends. He is a successful real estate agent with a lovely, kind wife and two children, a boy and a girl. News of the missing girl greatly disturbs Timo and he leaves home headed to Turku telling his family it is for business. The reader realizes that Timo must be the unnamed student who witnessed the first murder.  

In parallel with the police investigation, Timo’s abject wanderings in Turku seem to be centered on (re-)finding and perhaps outing the original killer. Police discover that Sinikka’s parents are consumed with guilt for the difficulties they have had with their adolescent daughter; they fear she has been snatched, perhaps killed, before they could patch things up.  The father is a suspect.

Timo finds Pärssinen again and learns that he is unaware of the copycat crime. The police also also visit Pärssinen as a person of interest, but nothing comes of it. Timo goes to Pia’s mother, still living in the same home, to express his sorrow for her loss.

SPOILER ALERT!  Primed by Ketola, Pia’s mother contacts the police. They raid Timo’s home in Helsinki and find child pornography on his computer. They know he cannot have committed the recent crime, but they are convinced that he killed Pia. As the noose tightens, Sinikka reappears alive and well from a hiding place in the forest. She staged the second crime as bait to lure the true killer in a plan she had cooked up for Ketola. Timo commits suicide and the police close both cases, but they are wrong.

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In Illness as Narrative, Ann Jurecic thoughtfully examines the unruly questions that personal accounts of illness pose to literary studies: What is the role of criticism in responding to literature about suffering?  Does the shared vulnerability of living in a body, which stories of illness intimately expose, justify empathic readings?   What is the place of skepticism in responding to stories of suffering?  Does whether or how we read illness narratives matter?  Jurecic's questions entice discussion at an interesting cultural moment.  The numbers of memoirs and essays about illness—and their inclusion in medical school and other humanities courses—multiplied from the later decades of the 20^th century to the present.   However, their increase, and their potential to encourage empathic readings, coincided with dominant literary theories that advocated vigorously skeptical, error-seeking responses to texts and their authors.  Jurecic reminds us that Paul Ricoeur called such responses "the hermeneutics of suspicion" (3). 

Jurecic's astutely researched, nuanced answers to those questions propose a corrective to the extreme skepticism of "disembodied criticism." Such criticism, she claims, dismisses testimonial writing from "a position of distance and privilege."  But her answers also affirm that intellectually "rigorous" responses to texts are central to the critical humanities (15).  To further her position, she offers attentive readings of accounts of illness by Virginia Woolf, Reynolds Price, and Jean-Dominique Bauby, as well as the theoretical writing of literary and other scholars.  For instance, Jurecic speculates that the condition of a reader's body aligns with his or her responses to texts.  In a chapter called "Theory's Aging Body," she observes that as skeptical scholarly readers age—Stephen Greenblatt, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler—they have turned their attention to "illness, vulnerability, and mortality" (93).  Jurecic also suggests that a function of criticism is to uncover the cultural conditions that memoirs and essays about illness respond to.  Living "at risk" is a recent one.  In stories of living with the risk of experiencing a particular illness in the future, potential patients create narratives of uncertainty to discover the "personal meaning of the impersonal statistics" that medical research now regularly delivers (18). 

 Jurecic also reflects on the ways theorists have understood the possibilities of representing and responding to pain in the varied approaches of philosophers Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty and of anthropologists Jean E. Jackson, Byron Good, and Veena Das.  In an exceptionally comprehensive and nuanced reading of Susan Sontag's theoretical, fictional, and journal writing about suffering, Jurecic uncovers Sontag's inconsistent, yet revelatory positions on the human capacity for responding to representations of pain.  The chapter on Sontag is enriched by Jurecic's reading of Annie Lebovitz's and David Reiff's responses to Sontag's suffering: in Lebovitz's controversial photographs of Sontag's final days (included in A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005) and Reiff's memoir about his mother's illnesses (Swimming in a Sea of Death). 

Illness as Narrative closes with examples of what Jurecic calls reparative writing and reading practices.  In the first instance, ill writers such as Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) both recreate "a more coherent sense of themselves" and dislodge "fixed ideas and narratives" about illness (109).  In the second instance, Jurecic outlines the limits of two competing readings of Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.  One assumes that readers will by nature empathically imagine those who are culturally different from themselves.  The other looks skeptically at the assumption that what medical educators call cultural competence can be acquired by reading a book.  Jurecic suggests that strategies for reading and teaching informed by Janelle S. Taylor, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Rita Felski can encourage more complex habits of response, such as Taylor's "'empathic curiosity'" (quoted 122).

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Dr. Jennifer White, age 64, is read her rights in a Chicago police station. But how much does the retired orthopedist who specializes in hand surgery really understand? Dr. White has Alzheimer's dementia. Her score of 19 on a mini-mental state examination (MMSE) is consistent with a moderate degree of cognitive impairment. She is questioned about the death of a neighbor, 75-year-old Amanda O'Toole, who lives 3 houses away. Amanda happens to be Dr. White's best friend and the godmother of her daughter. Amanda died at home, the result of head trauma. Four fingers of her right hand were cleanly and expertly chopped off. It seems that Dr. White is genuinely incapable of recalling whether she committed a murder or not. The physician is not charged with the crime but remains a suspect.

Dr. White's memory and mind are no longer reliable. In her lucid moments, she jots down notes in a journal. She dubs the notebook her "Bible of consciousness" [5] and it assists her in filling in the blanks of her past life. Her husband James has died. She has approximately $2.5 million of financial assets. Her two adult children - Mark and Fiona - squabble.  Throughout the course of her disease, family secrets are revealed and intimate details are exposed. Relationships fray.

Despite a slew of prescription medications (galantamine, an antipsychotic, an antidepressant, and a benzodiazepine as needed), Dr. White's mental status and behavior deteriorate. Her confusion, wandering, forgetfulness, and episodes of agitation worsen. The story is structured in four sections, based on the residence of the protagonist: First is Dr. White's time in her own home aided by a live-in caregiver, Magdalena. Next is her stay in an assisted living facility. Then she briefly escapes from that place and has a 36 hour adventure of sorts. Finally, Dr. White is incarcerated in a state mental health facility.

Ultimately, the circumstances of Amanda's death are made known. And while Dr. White did not kill her best friend, the surgeon was present at the scene with a scalpel in her hand. Another character was there too.

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Simon Bear is a hard-charging physician; his wife Emily is a successful public relations executive, now a senior partner in her firm. Although they have a lavish house, a teen-aged daughter, and much wealth, their marriage is troubled, in large part because they have never fully mourned the death of their baby Caleb.

The title “Remedies” fits well with the long struggle for how to heal their grief. The remedies that clearly have not worked are obsessions with career, professionalism, rationalism, and the trappings of American materialism.

Simon has two obsessions about his practice. The first is that he is a rescuer, the perfect doctor who listens to his patients and gives them what they want. As a self-appointed expert on pain, he is free and easy about prescribing opiates. When his father-in-law feels no pain after a car accident, Simon is sure that a drug that the man is taking is, in fact, the Holy Grail of pain medications. Simon becomes obsessed with this “discovery,” promoting it to his patients, without a scientific study or consideration of ethical implications. When he flies to a national medical meeting to trumpet the news of this remedy, no one will listen to him.

While Simon is the point of view for Parts One, Three, and Five, Emily—structurally separated—is the voice and focus of Parts Two and Four. She is troubled by her distance from Simon and, increasingly, her 13-year-old daughter, who is sullen and rebellious. When she meets Will, a former lover, she seeks another kind of remedy in an affair with him, even prospects of marriage. Contrasting with her strategic, rational approach to life, Will is an open, easy-going man, conveniently separated from his wife.

A series of crises rock Emily, then Simon. Emily begins to understand her anger; she has a breakthrough with her daughter. Simon has several setbacks, including humiliations, but he is not crushed. Although ordinarily a secular Jew, Simon attends the Kol Nidre service the evening service before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In a powerful and moving passage, he finds healing, relief, and a new direction for his life—a true remedy.   

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This is an aerial view of a comatose patient being force-fed by a funnel leading directly into her stomach. Surrounding the consultation table are six (identifiable) black-robed supreme judges gleefully pouring nutritious foods (grapes, fish, Quaker Oats, peanut butter, water and 7-Up) into her. Two tiny symbols, the scales of justice and a red-white-and-blue eagle contribute to the otherwise empty courtroom decor.

In the upper right corner, barely visible, is an open door with a "Keep Out" sign dangling from its knob, through which a doctor and nurse peer in. Four tiny red paper-doll figures holding hands, symbolizing the family, are also by this door. Hanging precariously over the patient and consultation table is an ugly, large, bare 25-watt light bulb.

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This documentary film follows the professional and private lives of the 2004 U.S. Wheelchair Rugby team. Murderball is a highly engaging, informative look at the lives of a group of quadriplegic men who are also elite athletes. The sport of "murderball" combines basketball, hockey, and rugby. It is played in custom-built wheelchairs with angled, shield-like metal side plates that make the chairs look like chariots, encouraging the term "gladiators" that is often applied to the players. Invented in Canada in the 1970s, murderball was renamed "wheelchair rugby" or "quad rugby" to make it less offensive to corporate sponsors, but retains its toughness with any name. The sport is played without helmets, and its players tackle each other through chair-to-chair collisions as they try to move the ball to the end zones.

The documentary begins with the 2002 World Wheelchair Rugby Championships in Sweden, includes team tryouts and competitions with arch-rival Canada, and closes with the Paralympic Games (held two weeks after the traditional Olympic Games end) in Athens, Greece. The film is a fast-paced sports documentary with abundant chair-level footage of action on the court, but also focuses on many aspects of the personal lives of key players, including psychological conflicts and sexuality. While the documentary is focused on the entire team, not individuals, three distinct subplots include the emotional journey of team captain Mark Zupan, including his relationship with the friend whose actions precipitated Zupan's disabling accident over ten years earlier; the passion and resentment of the Canadian team coach Joe Soares, who was cut from the U.S. Team and whose obsession with murderball leaves little space for Soares to appreciate his musically gifted teenage son until his own heart attack; and the experiences of newly disabled athlete Keith Cavill.

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In 1953 Alice Neel created a series of ink and gouache drawings depicting the last weeks of her mother's life, which were spent in a New York city hospital. One of these is at the Robert Miller website linked to this annotation. In the drawing, a black nurse comforts a prone elderly lady. The pale hues of the painting--blue, black, white--evoke a somber mood and imply sickness. This sense of despair is augmented by a harsh cityscape background beyond a dark river, which the viewer sees through a window.

Compassion counters these desolate surroundings, however, for a bond is apparent between the nurse and elderly patient. The nurse's hands rest on the patient in a partial cradling gesture, and the trajectory of the lines made by the nurse's arms and hands and the elderly patient's flowing hair establishes a visual and emotional link. The connection between the two figures is supplemented by the thin smiles on both women's faces.

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Mary Sutter has been trained as a midwife by her widowed mother, and has demonstrated an unusual aptitude.  She is an eager learner, but her deepest desire is to be a surgeon.  No medical school will take her, however.  As reports reach her home town of Albany of the escalation toward civil war around Washington DC, and in the wake of a disappointment in love,  she decides to board a train and offer her services to Dorothea Dix as a nurse.  Though Miss Dix refuses her on the grounds of her youth, Mary finds her way into apprenticeship with a surgeon who, as the numbers of injured climb, needs all the hands he can get.  Slowly and grudgingly, he comes to accept her as a competent assistant and, eventually, to teach her as a respected apprentice, and the remarkable companion she has become to him.  She learns surgery in the most grueling circumstances possible, amputating shattered limbs of young men, many of whom die anyway of infection or water-borne diseases.  In the course of her sojourn in Washington she meets John Hay and, through him, President Lincoln, whose compassionate attention she manages to direct to the dire need for medical supplies.  Two men love her not only for her intelligence and courage, but for the passion she brings to the hard-won skill that, though it cannot save her brother from the respiratory illness that is rampant in the camps, or her sister from a disastrous childbirth, saves many lives and makes a wider way for women of her generation who find themselves called to medicine. 

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In this series of six linked stories the narrator, Sara Boyd, weaves together stories of loss: her father's death when she was twelve, her husband's diagnosis of terminal kidney cancer, her mother's recurrent descent into mental illness, and even the death of a beloved dog. The stories merge in ways that reinforce the notion that new griefs bring up old ones, and that the trajectories of mourning are unpredictable and sometimes surprising in the conflicting currents of emotion they evoke. Sara doesn't present her life only in terms of losses, but the losses frame the story in such a way as to suggest that while key losses may not trump all other life-shaping events, they do organize and color them. The mother's mental illness is, in its way, a crueler loss than the death of Sara's beloved father, since hope of recovery keeps being dashed. Her siblings and children are marginal characters, but enter the stories enough to develop complex family contexts of caregiving.

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