Summary:

Hugely pregnant with her fourth child, Minn Burge, intelligent and frustrated mother of a four year-old girl and two year-old twins, prepares her vast but somewhat decrepit Toronto house for a party of film buffs and intellectuals. Her husband, Norman, is a foreign correspondent off on assignment in Katmandu--where, she believes, he is faithful, though surrounded by "amber and hairless women."

On the third floor of her Victorian home lives a small group of hippies. Against their lives and attitudes, she maps her own vagabond past, intimately connected to Europe and the much older but now deceased Honeyman, beatnik director of obscure films whose work is to celebrated that evening.

Through the lead up to and during the party, memories carry Minn back to vignettes of her home town origins, the strained relationship with her mother, the child-like goodness of cousin Annie (an adult trisomic), and the sexual awakening and loss she lived with Honeyman. Minn is tormented with the resentment and anger that she feels toward her husband and her much-loved babies--including the one in her belly--for the havoc they have brought upon her body and her mind.

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I used to be able to think. My brain’s circuits were all connected . . . I had a memory and an intuition that I could trust. So begins Floyd Skloot’s memoir of living his life with "a scatter of white spots like bubbles" in his brain, as a result of a viral illness in 1988 that led to chronic fatigue syndrome and persistent brain damage. The first section ("Gray Area") consists of essays that re-create a texture of mistaken words and memory lapses, as well as the author’s creativity in discovering ways to minimize or bypass disability in his daily life. The temporal vector of this section begins with the onset of illness; continues through his marriage to Beverly and their settling on a hilltop in Oregon; and ends with an idyllic stay on Achill Island off the western coast of Ireland.

The second section draws us back in time to "The Family Story," a series of stories about childhood. In "Kismet," which begins section 3, the author returns to a description of his post-illness experience, in this case to his fateful final visit with an older brother, who is dying of diabetes and kidney failure. Later, in "A Measure of Acceptance," he tells of his encounter with a Social Security psychiatrist, whose task is to determine whether Floyd Skloot is "really" sick. The Social Security Administration provides one measure of acceptance; but the author creates a more important measure of acceptance for himself: "I can say that I’ve become adept at being brain damaged. It’s not that my symptoms have gone away: I still try to dice a stalk of celery with a carrot instead of a knife . . . Along the way, though, I’ve learned to manage my encounters with the world." (p. 196)

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A surgical resident named Thor Bitterbaum happens to be in attendance when the fatally wounded President John Kennedy arrives at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. He immediately remembers the work of a scientist who had performed some successful cloning experiments. In the twinkling of an eye, he locates a liquid nitrogen container and freezes a sample of the President’s tissue. He then locates G. K. Kellogg, a multimillionaire who is willing to foot the bill to clone President Kennedy. Kellogg’s plan is to reproduce the major events of Kennedy’s life so that his "son" has essentially the same experience as JFK and grows up to be elected President of the United States.

Not surprisingly, some things go wrong with the plan, but, in general, the whole bizarre scheme works out as G. K. and "Uncle" Thor intend it to. Joshua Francis Kellogg, the cloned child, eventually learns his origin, rebels against his "father’s" plan, blows his cover by writing a book about his experience, but ultimately becomes a successful politician just as G. K. had envisioned.

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David Moray is a wealthy physician in his fifties who lives in a Swiss villa, where he indulges his passion for collecting art. He is contemplating a relationship with the stylish yet impoverished Frida von Altishofer, but an idle comment overheard at a party brings an intoxicating memory from his youth. As an idealistic medical student, he once loved and planned to marry Mary Cameron, a simple, highland lass. But first, David had to take a long sea voyage as a ship doctor to recover from tuberculosis; there he met pouting but provocative Doris, and her hopeful parents.

The prospect of a fabulous income in the family’s drug business makes him abandon Mary and a medical practice. He marries Doris but within a short time she is permanently committed to an asylum. The family semi-apologizes for not having told him of her illness. David compensates for his miserable marriage with material possessions that are a proxy for self esteem, until Doris dies and sets him free.

The overhead remark sends him back to Scotland only to discover that his jilted Mary, who had married a minister, is now dead. Her daughter, Kathy, is a nurse and the very spit of her mother. He falls in love all over again. Kathy will not marry him unless he returns to practice and joins her and her uncle as missionaries in Africa. Full of good intentions, he agrees. But he does not tell Kathy about Mary, and he forces himself on her against her will.

When he assimilates the very real dangers of mission work, he simply fails to show up for the appointed rendezvous; he will marry Frida and keep his cherished possessions instead. Told bluntly by Frida of the marriage and of her mother’s past, Kathy drowns herself. David must identify her body. He then hangs himself from a Judas Tree.

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The narrator needs a break from her unnamed troubles, so, on the recommendation of a friend, travels to a Texas farm to live with a German-American family for the month of March. The Muller extended family members are hard-working folk, at times gruff and laconic, but who clearly care for and love one another. The narrator is intrigued by the servant girl, Ottilie, who although disabled, disfigured and mute, cooks and serves meals for the twenty members of the household.

Ottilie later shows the narrator a photograph from her childhood, and the narrator (and reader) is startled to find out that not only was Ottilie a normal child, but she is also the eldest daughter of the matriarch and patriarch. Many of life’s milestones are encapsulated in the month, including a wedding, a birth, a natural disaster, and finally the death of Mother Muller. The family continues to ignore Ottilie and her suffering; in the end, only the narrator reaches out to aid Ottilie in her grief.

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Ashdown, a beautiful but bleak manor on the English coast, is the main setting of this story. Initially, a group of university students including Sarah Tudor, Gregory Dudden, Robert, and Terry reside at Ashdown. Some of these same students return there years later as either patients or staff when the building is converted into the Dudden Clinic where individuals with all sorts of sleep disorders are treated.

Sarah is a disturbed young woman suffering from narcolepsy. She is sometimes unable to differentiate her dreams from the experiences of real life. Robert is infatuated with her and will do literally anything to please her. Gregory is Sarah’s first lover, later a psychiatrist in charge of the sleep clinic, and finally a man gone mad who decides to self-experiment. Dr. Cleo Madison is a sleep psychologist whose true identity is a surprise. In this novel, reality appears more surrealistic than most dreams.

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The narrator carries hothouse orchids as a gift to a friend in the hospital. When he gets there, he feels out of place, not having expected "barricades / against infection, the doors’ / pneumatic psshh . . . . " He regrets that his gift flowers are tame, when "the room / cried out for wildness." The place is sleek, efficient, and antiseptic. His friend--who is not described in the poem--"would never rise / from the motored bed." Who could blame the narrator for looking away? Or for wishing that he could have brought a gift of wilder, more glorious flowers? (40 lines).

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Set in 1665, Journal of the Plague Year is a fictional account of the plague that set upon London that summer. Defoe, one of the first British novelists, walked a thin line between fact and fiction. His book poses as a firsthand account and contains statistical information on the plague, but is primarily fictional.

His novel charts the development of the infection, its spread, and the destruction it left in its wake. He provides gruesome accounts of medical practice in the era, including graphic descriptions of women dying in childbirth and vast burial pits. Doctors tried to stop the spread of the disease by killing 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats who they assumed carried the disease.

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A pregnant woman stands in profile to the viewer, with her head bowed down toward her belly and bared breasts. The woman’s eyes are closed and one hand, its fingers curled, is raised so that the palm faces away from her. Perhaps she is praying. A streak of grey angles up behind her head, possibly an abstract halo or wing.

The woman wears a colorful shawl, although her breasts are exposed. The shawl is intricately patterned with swirls and circles evocative of sperm and ova, respectively. A grey skull-cum-death’s head peers out from behind her belly. Beneath the woman and partially enshrouded by her shawl are three women who assume the same position of bent head, closed eyes, and raised hand(s).

All the activity in the image is compacted into a long pillar of sorts, the right side of which forms a fairly straight edge, and the left side of which curves outwards. Behind, a speckled golden-brown makes for a solid background with no perspective.

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These elder tales symbolize the developmental tasks one must master in the second half of life. They deal with psychological and spiritual growth and maturity in the later years. The author defines a fairy tale as "a folk tale with a happy ending, featuring ordinary people in fantastic situations, struggling with basic

human dilemmas." Elder tales offer a welcome relief to the ubiquitous symbols of idealized youth so prevalent in our culture. And they offer "a new image of maturity, centered on wisdom, self-knowledge, and transcendence... virtues of an archetypal figure long overlooked in modern society, but equal in importance to that of the Hero - the Elder."

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