Summary:

This painting depicts what in some respects mimics an anatomy amphitheater, but the title, "Arena," tells us that what is going on here is more spectacle than instruction. Painted in 1992, early in the AIDS epidemic, when rapid decline and death from the disease was almost unavoidable, this complex artwork catalogs some of what was taking place in society at the time. A shaft of window light illuminates the center where a masked doctor is examining a Caucasian patient while a nurse, similarly masked, stands nearby. A large white plume of smoke or steam is emanating from the patient's head. The examination is being filmed and narrated.
 
In the lower right-hand corner a dark skinned patient attached to an IV is lying on a gurney. An attendant has his back toward the patient, whom he seems to be ignoring as he speaks with another white clad hospital worker. If one follows a diagonal from the ignored patient through to the central figures, toward the upper left, another patient, covered completely by a sheet and apparently dead, is being wheeled out of the arena. Adjacent to this scene are people seated cross-legged on the floor, listening to a speaker reading from a book while a Buddha floats above him. [According to art critic Klaus Kertess, the reader is poet John Giorno, "who instructed Moore in Buddhist practice" (Toxic Beauty, p. 11)]. In the lower left, a vendor wheels his cart, selling soda and sausages, adding to the carnival atmosphere. Just ahead of him an elderly woman holds a flattened out body in her arms.
 
To the upper right, police barricades and struggling policeman attempt to hold back a group of protesters carrying a sign saying "Who's in Charge?". In the upper center, two skeletons stand in front of a screen and hold banners bearing Latin inscriptions. An instructor is pointing to drawings on the screen - molecules and cell membranes. Other skeletons are positioned at the edges of the painting, also bearing banners, and in the lower center two skeletons stand in front of a fruit tree. One of these skeletons holds what seems to be a heart dripping blood. Several figures dressed in costume are posing or dancing. The curved rows of the arena are sparsely populated and include skeletons of various animals as well as two men who are injecting themselves in the arm. Robotic figures appear here and there in the painting.

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Summary:

A hospital bed, pale blue sheets and pillows, white snowflakes. Where there might be an individual nestling his head into the pillow, there is instead a small pile of autumn leaves. In the center of one of the leaves, a small metal-like pentagon. Other leaves flutter on the bed and a small bird is perched on the bed railing above the pillow. There is blood issuing from a needle that is lying on the bed and is attached through tubing to an inverted bottle containing blood labeled "Irradiated" and "Moore, 1997." The juxtaposition of pastel colors and snowflakes with the leaking blood is striking.

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First published in France as a six-volume series from 1996-2003, this narrative is often referred to as an autobiographical graphic novel, but it is more accurately described as a graphic memoir. The author, born Pierre-François Beauchard, tells and draws the story of his family's life with the author's older brother, Jean-Christophe, whom we meet on the first page, in the year 1994: "It takes a moment for me to recognize the guy who just walked in. It's my brother . . . The back of his head is bald, from all the times he's fallen. He's enormously bloated from medication and lack of exercise." Flashback to 1964 when the author is five years old and his seven-year-old brother begins to have frequent grand mal epilepsy seizures. There follows the parents' mostly fruitless search for treatment to control the seizures, including: possible brain surgery which Jean-Christophe refuses in favor of an attempt at zen macrobiotics (this seems to work for six-months), consultation with a psychic, Swedenborgian spiritualism, magnetism, alchemy, exorcism by a priest, psychiatry (a different form of exorcism!).

Jean-Christophe's illness transforms family life as other children mock and fear the boy, the family moves to an isolated area, joins communes, and attempts to cope with Jean-Christophe's increasingly disturbed and disturbing behavior that alternates between passivity and physical aggression. The author has vivid visions and dreams and changes his name to David ("a symbolic act. I've won the war [against the threat of acquiring epilepsy" (164)]; his sister Florence suffers from constant anxiety; his mother grieves for many months after her father dies. As an adolescent and young man Jean-Christophe spends time in several institutions for handicapped individuals as well as at home, where he lives a desultory existence that is interspersed with violence toward the author and his father.

David escapes to Paris, living in a studio apartment paid for by his father, reading, writing stories, drawing, and attending classes at the Duperre School of Applied Arts. "I had to draw and write constantly. I had to fill my time in order to prevent my brother's disease from reaching me" (276). He is lonely but avoids people, feels guilty for neglecting his brother and ‘picking on' him yet is fearful that he too will be taken over by epilepsy, or death. Equally upsetting is when David discovers writings by Jean-Christophe: "He speaks of his despair and loneliness and the words might as well have come from my pen" (316). On and off, in moving displays of empathy, the author attempts to understand what happens to his brother during the seizures -- is he conscious, where does he go, does he die temporarily?

Within the narrative are intercalated multigenerational family histories that include two world wars, and European philosophical and cultural movements that influenced his parents and their search for treatments. The final section of Epileptic relates in words and images the author's adult life as he becomes a commercial artist; struggles through several relationships with women; his own infertility; his ever-present confusion, anger, and misery about his brother's illness; and his founding with five colleagues of the independent publishing house, L'Association: "It's the creation of L'Association that saves me" (327).

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Where many writers about illness have raised questions about the widespread and often unexamined appropriation of military metaphors to describe how doctors and patients have "struggled with," "combatted," "fought," or "defeated" illness, Dreuilhe embraces it and plays it out to the far reaches of its logic.  Part of the brilliance of this AIDS narrative lies in the way it brings new dimensions of meaning to a metaphor that has become so conventional as to be cliché or so imbedded in the language of illness and treatment, it simply fails to be recognized as metaphor.  Beginning with the "simple skirmishes at the frontier garrisons," Dreuilhe chronicles the progression of his own illness with the sharp eye of a good war reporter who sees through the chaos of the battlefield to the strategies being played out.  "Whenever I take an experimental drug," Dreulhe writes, "—and people fight desperately to be among those privileged to risk their lives—I feel as though I belong to a unit of shock troops parachuted behind enemy lines: already written off as a casualty, I'm entrusted with the task of spearheading the advance."

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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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A few years into their marriage, while their children are still young, Sara and Phil discover that he has an aggressive form of cancer.  He undergoes grueling surgery, but the cancer returns.  For Sara the prospect of Phil's death reawakens the trauma of losing her father when she was twelve.  Phil does his best to live a normal life between chemotherapy treatments and further surgeries, and even enters an experimental treatment in hope of seeing his children grow up.  His greatest pleasure in life is sailing, and one of his deepest hopes for his remaining time with his family to enjoy sailing with them in the ocean near their New England home.  But Sara finds it scary, even though she gamely learns to crew, and the kids never take to it.  So Phil sails with friends, and sometimes alone.  After learning that the cancer has continued to spread despite every medical effort, Phil decides to take one last sailing trip, this time alone, on the ocean.  There he has to make a decision:  his intention is simply to sail until his body gives out and die on the boat he loves, sparing Sara, he thinks, having to watch him die a slow and painful death.  But he begins to realize that letting her see him through might, after all, be a better way to go.  As the novel ends, he turns the boat, now quite far from land, toward home.  

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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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This memoir spins out in detail the despair and violence that emerges from a childhood of poverty and parental absence. When Dubus was preadolescent, his writer father of the same name (see Andre Dubus), took up with a student of his, and the parents divorced. Andre's mother became a social worker, working full-time with no support system, exhausted. Although Andre's father lived nearby and paid child support, it was never enough to keep the four children and their mother out of poverty. They moved frequently, always to the rough sections of depressed Massachusetts towns on or near the Merrimack River. The memoir describes vividly the smells of the polluted river; garbage strewn lawns; smoky, raucous bars; afternoons and evenings spent aimlessly watching television and, in adolescence, neighborhood kids and punks doing drugs and sex in Andre's home - before his mother arrived back from work each evening  .

At school, in bars, and around the neighborhood, kids and adults beat each other up - violence was a constant. Andre was slight and fearful but also drawn to watch the frequent fights. He avoided direct involvement when he could, was beaten up when he couldn't, and loathed himself in either case. He felt like a non-person: "There was the non-feeling that I had no body, that I had no name, no past and no future, that I simply was not. I was not here" (78). Finally, after being unable to help his brother during a fight, Andre resolved to build himself up physically--lifting barbells, bench pressing, and eventually taking boxing lessons.

Now when there was the threat of a fight, he plunged in quickly, inflicting damage. He could defend himself and those he cared about. But always there was the need for vigilance and the need - frequently actualized - to explode in rage. Later, he came to realize that being quick to jump into fights was a way "to get out what was inside him. Like pus from a wound, it was how [I] expressed what had to be expressed" (191). Gradually Andre came to think there might be other ways "to express a wound."

In the second part of the memoir, Dubus writes of how that other way evolved into creative writing. Training for physical prowess had imposed some discipline in his life, which meant being able to concentrate in school, do homework, and read. There were stints in and out of college (eventually he graduated from the University of Texas in Austin), making ends meet as a gas station attendant, construction worker, fast food manager, bartender, and later-- halfway house counselor. At the local Massachusetts college he attended for a while, he overheard himself being called a "townie." He navigated at the interface of the old neighborhood where he still lived and the life of the more privileged. He became more self-aware, more interior, and at the same time, more interested in the larger world. Threaded throughout this period is a developing relationship with his father, whose writing he admired and whose approval he craved.

In spite of the author's ambivalence toward his father - "where were you when I needed you?" (333)--one probably cannot overestimate the role that the senior Dubus played as a writer model for his son. Dubus read and admired his father's stories. He saw the discipline required to write, even though Dubus senior's weekends were often spent unwinding in bars (sometimes with the younger Dubus). Andre met his father's academic colleagues, met other writers, met writers who had stable relationships with a spouse.

He even learned that a writer can be a sports fan (Boston Red Sox), and avid sports participant (jogger). One of the most moving chapters in the book describes the first baseball game Dubus ever attended or watched - at age 13 - (with two tickets from his father), to see the Red Sox play the Yankees in Boston. Dubus went with a friend who explained the game to him as it unfolded. Dubus was stunned: "Every time one of them walked up to home plate with his bat, hundreds of men and boys would yell insults at him I couldn't quite make out, just the tone, which I knew well, but it wasn't directed at me or anyone I would have to try to protect, and I felt relieved of everything, part of something far larger than I was, just one of thousands and thousands of people united in wanting the same thing, for those men from our team to beat the men from the other team, and how strange that they did this by playing, that one beat the other by playing a game" (161-162).

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A series of interrelated stories that include a novella (Sukkwan Island), the book is a semi-autobiographical tale of the impact of a father's suicide on his teenage son.  The author, David Vann, represents his fictional self as Roy Fenn, and his father as Jim.  In the first story, "Ichthyology," Roy is born on an island "at the edge of the Bering Sea" of Alaska and then he and his family move to Ketchikan, on an island in southeastern Alaska.  Roy's father is ever restless and that includes an interest in women other than his wife.  When Roy is about five years old the marriage breaks up and Roy moves to California with his mother.  At the end of this chapter, Roy's father kills himself with one of his own guns.

"Rhoda" is the story of Jim's second marriage to Rhoda who becomes Roy's stepmother, until that marriage also ends in divorce.  "A Legend of Good Men" relates how Roy's mother was courted by various suitors following her divorce.  These narratives are told from Roy's perspective.  The next and largest section of the book is "Sukkwan Island."  It is on this Alaskan island that Roy spends an extended visit with his father, in a simple, isolated cabin where their only other human contact is with a supply plane that comes periodically.  Life is primitive and difficult and reflects the relationship of father and son, which is uneasy and foreign to Roy.  Jim is depressed, obsessed with his former wife Rhoda and often cries at night, which Roy finds sad, scary, and eventually despicable.  Life on the island takes a bizarre turn, which I will not reveal here.

In "Ketchikan" Roy at age 30 returns to the town of his early childhood "the place where my dead father had first gone astray [with Gloria, his dental receptionist], the place where this father and his suicide and his cheating and his lies and my pity for him, also, might finally be put to rest" (209).  The last story, "The Higher Blue," is a mixture of fantasy and narrative reality; comments about Jim made by Roy's mother serve to bookend the novel.

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