Summary:

Elizabeth Mann, the daughter of a world famous fertility specialist whom she despises, hasn’t quite made it into medical school. She runs away to London, where she can revel in an orgy of self-destructive behavior, while working as a freelance writer for a travel guidebook. She soon develops two obsessions. In an obscure medical museum she encounters the skeleton of Jonathan Wild, a famous 18th century criminal who met his death by hanging. During the same museum visit, she runs across Gideon Streetcar, a young fertility specialist who once worked with her father. Though Gideon is "happily" married, he and Elizabeth soon begin a torrid affair.

Elizabeth’s obsession with Jonathan Wild grows when, through Gideon, she obtains a copy of the criminal’s second wife’s memoir. Through it, she learns that his first wife, who died in childbirth, was named Elizabeth Mann. She develops a scheme to obtain DNA from Wild’s skeleton and use it in association with an experimental cloning procedure to become pregnant with the 18th century criminal’s child (clone).

When the 25 year old Elizabeth reveals that her father tied her tubes when she was 16, after having aborted her fetus--a "slut," he called her--Gideon agrees to attempt in vitro fertilization with her eggs and his sperm. He transfers two blastocysts, plus one of the supposedly cloned Jonathan Wild cells. She becomes pregnant. Soon thereafter she returns to the USA when her father has a massive heart attack and she, apparently, has an opportunity to go to medical school.

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An imaginative recreation of profound personal loss, the resulting changes wrought by unexpected responsibility as well as opportunity, all occurring during the progression from late adolescence into young adulthood, this work is centered on the death and its aftermath of the author’s parents 32 days apart, when the author was 21 years old (in 1991). With two siblings embarked on their own careers, it was Dave who took on "parenthood" of their eight-year old brother, "Toph."

The book details first, the mother’s death, then, the life that Eggers and Toph negotiate for themselves and with each other after they move from suburban Chicago to Berkeley, California, and, finally, Dave’s return visit to his hometown, wherein he seeks to exorcise some ghosts. In between these landmarks are reflections on family relationships, including that with a shadowy, alcoholic father; the launch of a satiric magazine, "Might" (a title meant to signify both power and possibility); concern for wounded friends; attempts to lead a "normal" life.

While the bare facts of Eggers’s story are unusual enough, the writing is arrestingly original--performative, conversational, brash, yet self-deprecating, funny, and often moving. It is not inaccurate, and will give a flavor of the writing style, to describe the book’s "themes" in the author’s own words (from the 21-page Acknowledgments), for example: "The Unspoken Magic Of Parental Disappearance"--the admission that this traumatic experience of loss "is accompanied by an undeniable but then of course guilt-inducing sense of mobility, of infinite possibility, having suddenly found oneself in a world with neither floor nor ceiling" (xxv); "The Brotherly Love/Weird Symbiosis Factor"; "The Knowingness About The Book’s Self-Conscious Aspect"--an acknowledgment that self-reference is "simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story" (xxvii); "The Telling The World Of Suffering As Means Of Flushing Or At Least Diluting Of Pain Aspect"; "The Putting This All Down As Tool For Stopping Time Given The Overlap With Fear Of Death Aspect."

Dave Eggers is on his way to New York with Toph as the book ends. They currently live in Brooklyn, where Eggers produces a quarterly literary journal (Timothy Mcsweeney’s Quarterly Concern, A Journal Created By Nervous People In Relative Obscurity) and a related Web site.

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After an argument with his wife, Dunn’s narrator considers differences between his instinctive male response to differences, and reliance on words. She always "argues beyond winning," "skewering him into silence." Next day she has forgotten her words, while he remembers each one wondering "if recovering from them is possible."

As a boy in the schoolyard he learned to argue with his fists, while she and her girlfriends [were] "learning other lessons." He, like other boys/men, didn’t use and is unable to perceive that her words, however wrong, derive from "much hurt and love." So what’s going on here? He is silent, resentful, feeling a need to strike or punch. She, on the other hand says to excess what she feels, using words, the skills she learned as a girl.

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Julia’s sister, Kara, has a recurrence of leukemia, and, because of the horrors of chemotherapy along with a dismal prognosis, decides to forgo treatment. Kara asks Julia, along with two of her closest friends, to participate in a "sweat," an Indian purification ceremony intended to "recenter" one’s spirit prior to death. The idea of her sister dying has caught Julia off guard, despite Kara’s dismal prognosis, her baldness, her gray color in the mirror.

Kara lives life to the fullest, without fear; in sharing her life, Julia had forgotten about the reality of death. Julia is surprised when in only five days the ceremony takes place, and thinks of all the practical reasons this ceremony makes no sense. Against her will, Julia takes her sister to the sweat tent and participates in the ceremony. Even though it might have hastened her sister’s death, Julia comes to realize the importance of the ritual, for as her sister dies, she, herself, feels closer to her than ever before, and is finally able to see how Kara’s life had fit into a larger design.

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This collection of contemporary poems published by the National Association for Poetry Therapy Foundation is accompanied by an introduction and materials for use in support groups and poetry therapy groups dealing with loss and grief. Organized under the rubric, “Seasons of the Heart,” in sections entitled “Autumn,” “Winter,” and “Spring,” they reflect a range of responses to loss, both sudden and gradual.

Poets include Rainer Maria Rilke, Naomi Shihab Nye, Billy Collins, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, and other well-known and widely anthologized poets as well as some less known, but well worth reading. The poetry is skillfully selected, of consistent literary quality, and the accompanying materials helpful in suggesting ways and reasons to enter into the work of reading and writing poetry in time of loss.

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The story opens with the protagonist, identified only as the "Patient," being forcibly carried into the insane asylum. Once there, he no longer protests, but seems to accept his incarceration in the huge, overcrowded hospital. The doctor and other staff members seem particularly kind. Because the Patient rapidly loses weight, despite his good appetite, he receives a special diet.

The Patient notices a single scarlet flower among the many beautiful flowers in the hospital garden. He suddenly realizes that all the evil in the world is condensed into the scarlet flower. His mission is to destroy it. But when he attempts to pick the flower, hospital personnel prevent him from doing so, since picking flowers is prohibited. Eventually, he manages to destroy the flower, but notices a second scarlet blossom in the garden. He destroys that one as well, but a third scarlet flower appears. Finally, the Patient sneaks out at night to deal with the third flower, and then is found dead in the garden the next morning, clutching the remains of the scarlet blossom.

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A long hallway stretches almost all the way to the end of the viewer's perspective. One solitary figure about halfway down the hall makes a quick exit from our view as it ducks into an abutting room. The hallway is colored in somber tones--browns, greens, and muddy yellows make up most of the coloration. These colors make the hallway appear as though it is composed of awkward rivers flowing across the plane of the floor, suggesting a sort of moat or barricade across which travel might be difficult. Additionally, the archways are not stylistically consistent--the arch closest to the viewer is more plain, more bleak, and seems to cordon off the viewer's end of the hall from the remainder of the corridor.

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A figure stands left of center, erect and facing forward in a room. He is, as described by the painting's title, standing between the tall grandfather clock and the bed. Vibrantly colored and painted with a tumultuous energy, this image does not immediately connote Munch's typical themes of death and sickness. Yet his hands hang limply by his side, and the clock (sans hands or numerals) and bed can be understood symbolically, not only as a statement of the relationship between time and sleep, but also as to where Munch sees himself in his artistic career. (He appears to be stepping forward into the room, no longer concerned with time, "impassively awaiting death" (Loshak, p. 106).

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A skeletal figure - death - sits atop a horse and brandishes a scythe. His horse, presently in front of the viewer, runs the wrong way along the racetrack. The track stretches far into the distance, all the way to the horizon. The landscape and sky are of muted color; a solitary dead tree bordering the racetrack on the right side of the painting sets the emotional tone of the landscape. At the bottom of the painting, a snake winds its way along the ground.

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The story takes place in the town of Weston, the site of Weston Medical School, with its teaching hospital and private faculty clinic. The main characters are a group of seven men (six physicians and one administrator) who met while serving together in the Army during the Korean War and later joined to form the nucleus of Weston Medical School. These men all occupy prestigious positions as chiefs of various clinical departments and conduct lucrative private practices at the clinic.

Their wives meet regularly in what they call the "Dissection Club." While the women are said to be friends, their meetings consist primarily of backbiting, cattiness, and expressions of profound boredom. Mostly, they are bored with their sex lives. While the wives generally engage in small-scale infidelities (including a medical student in one case), Lorrie Delman, the wife of the biochemist, is exceptional because of her voracious sexual appetite, about which she is highly vocal. Lorrie obsessively "sleeps around." In fact, she proposes that the group devise a regular sequence of husband swapping, a suggestion that her friends vote down in favor of a more random approach to adultery.

The drama commences when Mort Delman catches his wife in bed with Paul McGill, the dermatologist. Delman shoots a single bullet that goes through Lorrie's back and chest, killing her (she is lying on top of Paul) and then lodges in her lover's heart. Marissa Feldman, the brand new female physician, accurately diagnoses and treats Paul's life-threatening cardiac tamponade in the emergency room, after which Anton Dieter, the cardiac surgeon, removes the bullet lodged in the victim's right ventricle. Needless to say, Paul McGill recovers uneventfully, and Drs. Feldman and Dieter engage in a sexual escapade.

Meanwhile, members of the "Dissection Club" begin to re-assess their lives and loves. After all, they conclude, any of their husbands could have been caught at Lorrie Delman's house having some "afternoon delight." Perhaps the wives should pay more attention to their husbands, or otherwise enhance the meaningfulness of their lives. While this is going on, Mort Delman, the biochemist-killer, has no fear of languishing in jail because he has a perfect "impassioned husband" defense. In addition, he also manages to pull off a scheme to extort money from the other physicians in return for his leaving town and not revealing everyone's secrets. If this isn't enough to whet your appetite, Doctors' Wives also features additional plot twists and a surprise ending.

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