Summary:

Born with aortic stenosis in 1984, Adam Ferrara Jasheway died suddenly at age nineteen of cardiac arrest. Dedicated to the memory of her son, this collection poignantly charts a mother's trajectory of grief. The poems are divided/organized into six sections paralleling the process of alchemy: calcinatio (burning by fire), solutio (dissolving in water), sublimatio (rising in air), coagulatio (falling to earth), mortificatio (decaying), and transmutatio (healing).

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The Cold War. America and Russia (or rather "us" and "them") have both developed miniaturization technology that enables them to reduce objects, including human beings, to microscopic size. The Americans are unable to control the objects’ return to normal size after an hour; the Russians can. An American spy called Benes has stolen this information from the Russians but on his return to America he is injured when the Russians try to kill him. He develops a blood clot in his brain.

To remove the clot, a team of western scientists, led by the surgeon Duval (Edmond O’Brien) and a British vascular specialist, Michaels (Donald Pleasance), is miniaturized inside a submarine which is injected into Benes’s carotid artery. Dr. Duval has a laser gun with which he is to destroy the clot. Also on the submarine are Grant (Stephen Boyd), a military employee in charge of security, and Cora Petersen (Raquel Welsh), Duval’s technical assistant.

The team has an hour to reach the patient’s brain and destroy the clot. They overcome various hurdles, including being washed through an arterial-venous fistula in the jugular vein, having to travel through Benes’s heart (which is temporarily arrested by the outside surgical team to keep the submarine from being crushed), being attacked by antibodies in the lymphatic system, and having to replenish their air supply by breaking through the wall of an alveolar sac.

Finally, they reach the brain and find the clot, but Dr. Michaels turns out to be spying for the other side, and tries to sabotage the mission. He crashes the submarine, but is thwarted by Grant and ingested by a white blood cell. Duval destroys the clot and the crew escapes Benes’s body via the optic nerve. They are washed out in a tear just as they are beginning to return to normal size. Benes is never seen to wake up, but the film’s ending implies that the mission has been successful.

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In a future society in which biological reproduction is restricted and humanoid robots ("Mechas") are routinely manufactured to supplement the economic and social needs of humans ("Orgas"), Dr. Hobby (William Hurt) creates a prototype child Mecha, David (Haley Joel Osment), who has "neuronal feedback," the ability to love, and "an inner world of metaphor, self-motivated reasoning," imagination, and dreams. David is given to Henry and Monica, a couple whose biological child Martin is incurably ill and cryopreserved, awaiting a future cure.

More specifically, David is created out of Hobby's own loss and given to aid Monica's mourning for Martin, whom she has been unable to "let go" of as dead. It is thus Monica (Frances O'Connor) who must make the decision to perform the "imprint protocol" that will make David love her. After she stops resisting the desire to love a child (of any kind) again and implements the protocol, Martin is unexpectedly cured and comes home.

The ensuing turmoil sends David, accompanied by a robot Teddy bear, out into a nightmare world of adult Mechas, comprised of both Rouge City, where functioning Mechas like Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) do their sex worker jobs and also the fugitive realm where unregistered, discarded Mechas try to find the spare parts they need to rebuild themselves and elude trappers who take them to reactionary "Flesh Fairs" where they are publicly destroyed as an expression of rage against artificial technologies.

Joe and David, both set up and betrayed by humans jealous of their superiority at performing human functions, join together on a quest to make David "real" and return him to Monica. The quest takes them to a partly submerged Manhattan and sends David and Teddy two thousand years into the future to resolve the dystopic narrative.

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Summary: All thirteen short stories in this collection draw readers into the quietly compelling lives of disparate and very ordinary characters who function and suffer in unsettling ways. We are like them and not like them, but their circumstances, while sometimes disturbing, are familiar--and strangely magnetic. The opening lines of "The Lapse" illustrate this power of attraction:

I married Joanne during a lapse. A religious lapse. I don't display my beliefs like a gold medallion, though, as many whom I know do. I prefer to observe in private. After all, any intimate relationship belongs only to the entities or people involved. (p. 35)

Who can bypass an invitation to enter into announced intimacies, however private, that must be revealed in a matter of pages. What lapse and who is Joanne?!

"Bad News," centers around Sheila Powers, a psychologist, whose disruptive marital break-up is compounded by her mother's recent diagnosis of cancer and a subsequent flow of memories about her mother, her father, and herself. She is "between worlds...between life zones." (p. 113) Aspects of the future, at least her mother's, may be somewhat predictable, but the complex depths of the past mix with the present to generate sticky threads that belong to the story and to the readers as well who will recognize bits and pieces of their own family lives.

In a fourteen page story with a decidedly off-putting title, "The Encyclopedia," Wineberg zeroes in on Doris who, after a dissolved relationship, decides to sell the thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica-"the macro-edition, the micro-edition and the year books" purchased by the former couple. Not about remote bits of history or dinosaurs, we discover, but a story about separation, a series of lovers, benign conversation with a fellow worker who claims to be similarly tired of men, a possible buyer for the unwanted encyclopedia, a relationship with the married buyer, an end to the relationship, and a decision to keep the books after all. Her life, we might decide, is encyclopedic, a litany of minutiae that does, indeed, provide information about conditions of existence.

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Author Diedrich investigates ("treats") mid-late 20th century memoirs about illness (illness narratives) from an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on the disciplines of literature, social sciences, and philosophy. Her analysis uses the theoretical frameworks of poststructuralism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis to consider "what sort of subject is formed in the practice of writing . . . illness narratives," the kind of knowledges articulated by such writing, whether and how such writing can transform "expert medical knowledges," how language operates in these memoirs, and "what sort of ethics emerges out of such scenes of loss and the attempts to capture them in writing" (viii).

The book is divided into Introduction, five chapters on specific memoirs, and Conclusion. Chapter 1, "Patients and Biopower: Disciplined Bodies, Regularized Populations, and Subjugated Knowledges," draws on Foucault's theory of power to discuss two mid-20th-century memoirs of institutionalization for tuberculosis. Betty McDonald's the Plague and I is compared with Madonna Swan: A Lakota Woman's Story. Dividing practices and regularization are shown to serve different functions in these two incarcerations, figurative in the case of Betty McDonald, and literal in the case of Madonna Swan.

Chapter 2, "Politicizing Patienthood: Ideas, Experience and Affect," draws on Foucault's approach to the subject and on his discussion of "practices of the self" in contrasting Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals with Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (see annotations). Diedrich also brings into her analysis Eve Sedgwick's theory of queer performativity and Sedgwick's own illness narrative, White Glasses. Diedrich views all of these as counter narratives to the clinical medical narrative of illness but she shows how they differ in stance.

Chapter 3, "Stories For and against the Self: Breast Cancer Narratives from the United States and Britain" looks at "the arts of being ill" as they are represented in two cultures, two "conceptions of the self in these countries at a particular historical moment" (61). The narratives discussed are Sandra Butler and Barbara Rosenblum's narrative, Cancer in Two Voices and Ruth Picardie's Before I Say Goodbye (see annotations). Diedrich associates Cancer in Two Voices with an American notion of self-improvement and Before I Say Goodbye with a British "emphasis on the cultivation of an ironic self" (55). The author works in this chapter with Freud's idea of the uncanny, Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined political communities" and Elaine Scarry's discussion of pain, language, and the unmaking of the self.

Chapter 4, "Becoming-Patient: Negotiating Healing, Desire, and Belonging in Doctors' Narratives," treats Oliver Sacks's illness narrative, A Leg to Stand On, Abraham Verghese's autobiographical My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS, and Rafael Campo's book of essays, The Poetry of Healing (see annotations). Here Diedrich considers "the possibility that doctors, especially AIDS doctors, might become patients through desiring-and writing-productions" (83) and she utilizes the rhizome model of Deleuze and Guattari to make her case. She discusses how Verghese and Campo are each both cultural insiders and outsiders and how they each "bring the body into language through their writing" (88).

Chapter 5, "Between Two Deaths: Practices of Witnessing," focuses primarily on Paul Monette's writing about the loss of his partner to AIDS, and on John Oliver Bayley's books about the loss of his wife, Iris Murdoch, to Alzheimer's, and her ultimate death (see annotations in this database). In this chapter Diedrich invokes Lacan's concept of the real and his formulation of "the ethical possibility of being between two deaths" (117). She draws also on trauma theory and the work of Kelly Oliver, a contemporary feminist philosopher who has written on witnessing.

Finally, in her "Conclusion: Toward an Ethics of Failure," Diedrich returns to Elaine Scarry's "phenomenological discussion of the experience of pain" and brings in Jean-François Lyotard's concept of incommensurability and his suggestion between the two poles of what is seemingly incommensurable one might search, in Diedrich's words, for "new rules for forming and linking phrases between . . . subject positions" (150). In that context she analyzes physician Atul Gawande's discussion of medical uncertainty and error in his book, Complications (see annotation) and philosopher Gillian Rose's book, Love' s Work. Diedrich concludes that the basic incommensurability between doctor and patient can be a starting point for a new ethics, an ethics of failure and risk "because by taking such risks [of failure, of relations], we open up the possibility of new routes, new treatments: in and between art, medicine, philosophy, and politics" (166).

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Summary:

A Princeton professor has less than one night to live. His physician visits him in the hospital late in the evening. Dr. Dean is uncomfortable interacting with the dying man. He feigns optimism about the clinical situation and offers false hope but avoids eye contact with the professor and urgently exits the room. A compassionate nurse, Mrs. Roszel, is on duty. Before bedtime, she gves the professor a blue pill that dampens the constant pain in his stomach and also provides a pleasant sensation of weightlessness.

Out of nowhere, he hears a beautiful melody played on a violin. It is barely audible and imperceptible to the nurse. The professor has been a violinist since his youth, and the music triggers a flashback. Sixty years earlier, as a 15-year-old boy, he visited a small town in Italy. The silence of the village was punctured by heavenly violin music. Time slowed and then stopped. Light surrounded and permeated him before giving way to absolute darkness. Was it enlightenment or heatstroke? He awoke and saw a priest hovering over him.

Like that day long ago, the violin music now playing in his hospital room is still a revelation. The harmony reveals the mystery of the universe - the connection between time and space and light. Suddenly it is imperative that the professor shares this new knowledge before he dies. Calling fo Nurse Roszel, he attempts to impart to her what he has just discovered. She is baffled by the language but listens intently anyway.

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Memoirs of Hadrian is a historical novel in the form of a long letter written by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to his young friend and eventual successor, Marcus Aurelius. Alas, Hadrian is "growing old, and is about to die of a dropsical heart." The Emperor begins by describing his recent visit with his physician Hermogenes, who "was alarmed, in spite of himself, at the rapid progress of the disease" (3). In light of his physical deterioration, Hadrian begins to reflect on his life and work, and to share his wisdom with his young correspondent.

Hadrian tells of his early life as the protégé of the Emperor Trajan, his military and political victories, and his eventual adoption by Trajan, a move that guaranteed the succession when his adoptive father died. While Trajan, whose victories brought the Roman Empire to its greatest size, was a military man to the core, Hadrian considers himself essentially peace loving--his personal life devoted to simplicity and harmony; and his public life to prosperity and justice. Nonetheless, he has always recognized that, in order to govern effectively, ruthless action is sometimes required.

Hadrian's marriage to the Empress Sabina was simply a matter of convenience. The love of his life was a beautiful young man named Antinous. The two men were deeply committed to one another, but at the same time the middle-aged emperor had "a certain dread of bondage" ( 177) that kept him from fully giving himself to Antinous with the abandon of youth. They were visiting Alexandria when the despondent Antinous committed suicide in a way that mimicked a religious ritual, essentially sacrificing himself to the deified Emperor.

Hadrian was crushed with grief and descended into a long period of depression. However, he eventually overcame his depression through his love of literature and ideas, as well as his sense of duty to the Empire (no SSRIs being available at the time), although not before attempting to enlist his physician in assisted suicide. Unable to refuse his emperor's request, the physician himself commits suicide rather than violating his Hippocratic Oath.

Hadrian's final military engagements involve crushing Jewish insurgents in Palestine, completing the destruction of Jerusalem, and founding a new Roman city on its site. The aged Emperor reflects frequently on his tolerance for all religions, except for politically disruptive fanatics like the followers of a Jewish prophet called Christ. As to the Jews in Palestine, he cannot understand why they continue to engage in self-destructive rebellion, most recently with Bar Kokhba and Rabbi Akiva as their leaders.

In his final years Hadrian adopts Lucius, one of his former lovers (in this account), as his son and heir, but Lucius soon dies, presumably from tuberculosis. Eventually, the Emperor adopts Antinous Pius as his heir and further arranges for Marcus Aurelius to succeed Antinous Pius. At the end of his letter, Hadrian writes, "I could now return to Tibur, going back to that retreat which is called illness, to experiment with my suffering, to taste fully what delights are left to me, and to resume in peace my interrupted dialogue with a shade." [i.e. Antinous, his lost love (271)].

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Three skeletons in black robes are busy in the task of watering and taking care of various plants. The skeleton in the foreground holds a green watering can, faces to the left, and walks behind a wooden construction of some sort. Behind him another skeleton clutches a stalk of blue flowers to his chest. In the background, the third skeleton faces away from us, apparently busy with some task at hand.

The flowers in the picture are odd and unlike flowers found in life. Their shapes range from spiky to round, their colors from white to black. In the distance a path leads to the Garden of Death through green woodland.

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This partly autobiographical collection of linked stories could, as the author notes at his web site, be considered a novel as much as a collection. There is a single first-person (unnamed) narrator throughout, a circumscribed cast of characters, a timeline of almost 30 years, and "individual stories [that speak] to each other and [gather] force as they go forward" (see interview at the author's web site). At the center of these reflections and of the narrator's life is his enigmatic, beautiful mother, "Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches . . . Our Mother of the Mixed Messages," "Our Mother whom I adored and whom, in adoring, I ran from, knowing it 'wrong' for a son to wish to be like his mother" (17). The book also delves significantly into the relationship between the narrator and his older brother, and to a lesser extent concerns the narrator's relationship with his father, who dies when the narrator is 11 years old. Interwoven throughout is the narrator's growing awareness and suppression of his own homosexuality.

All the stories are refracted through memory, back to when the narrator was nine years old, living with his brother, mother, and father in post-World War II Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. The stories progress through a roaming young adulthood of lies and random sexual encounters; and move into adulthood, committed relationships, and accumulating personal losses. In addition to the mother, of almost equal importance is the narrator's ambivalent relationship to his brother, Davis, who is sometimes an ally and sometimes a competitor or antagonist. Initially contemptuous of the narrator's identification with his mother, Davis later leads a defiant, drug dependent, and openly homosexual life while the narrator himself remains closeted to his parents and to many others. The narrator depicts himself and his brother as Cain and Abel, only "I was Cain and Abel both, as was my brother" (158).

Particularly striking are "My Mother's Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame," "The Diarist," and "My Brother in the Basement." In "My Mother's Clothes" McCann develops themes of the narrator's infatuation with his mother, his guilt about that, his uncomfortable relationship with his father, and renunciation -- of his friendship with another boy. "The Diarist" focuses on the narrator's difficult interaction with his father, who expects masculine behavior from him, and with brother Davis, who seems to have no trouble fitting into the role expected of him. "My Brother in the Basement" moves forward into young adulthood and the shocking outcome of Davis's life, and the narrator's retrospective and revisionist analysis of that time.

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After living with various foster families, nine-year-old Gabe is taken to live with his aging Uncle Vernon in West Virginia. The relationship with his mother's gruff and distant older brother, a Vietnam vet, is distant at first, but warms up over time. But after his first day in 6th grade, Gabe comes home to find his uncle dead on the floor.

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