Recently,
after reading an essay on two very obscure English war poets by Anthony
Daniels, a former prison doctor and, among other things, a literary critic of
unusual sensibility, I was driving along my suburban mother commute and playing
a sort of solitaire mental parlor game: a list of famous fiction writers who
were also doctors—I had Rabelais, Maugham, Conan Doyle, Chekhov, Celine. Later
it occurred to me to check Wikipedia, and sure enough there's a very helpful
entry for "Physician writer." I'd forgotten Smollett and Bulgakov and
William Carlos Williams (a bit embarrassing there); some were a bit of a
stretch (Keats and de Musset? Do med-school dropouts count?)—but I was startled
to see no mention of one of the most notable recent physician novelists, Chris
Adrian.
Chris Adrian is a
pediatric oncologist—treating children with cancer—and his specialty is very
evident in all his work, and particularly in his 2006 novel, The Children's Hospital: matters of life and death, especially death too
early in life, and the hallucinatory visions born of sleeplessness from panicky
parents and frustrated doctors. Other parts of Adrian's life—including the
death of his older brother in a car accident, his airline pilot father and
alcoholic mother, his studies in divinity school—also recur in his work. Oh,
and he's on record as really liking stories with magic ponies in them.
In The Great Night, Adrian's retelling of Midsummer Night's Dream in Buena Vista Park in San Francisco, we
have the seeds of a familiar story: a quarrel between Oberon and Titania over a
mortal boy, hapless lovelorn mortals wandering willy-nilly, some rude
mechanicals putting on a play, Titania's strange passion for a grotesque. As
these facts pass through his imagination, they turn into something rich and
strange: surreal, contemplative, ornate, and crude. His urban forest, lush and
rank, is inhabited by all kinds of hybrids: brokenhearted heterosexuals and
homosexuals, fairyfolk and homeless people, walking phalluses and flying
vaginas, stray dogs, wild boys, Puck on the loose, bicycles, and even a magic
pony.
It's a wild ride—I found
it almost viscerally thrilling, especially the experience of moving through his
prose as it crackles and purrs. But while I don't at all intend to disparage
the book's imaginative acrobatics and arabesques by saying this, the most
brilliant and profound reimagining in Adrian's vision isn't the way he magics
the humans but the way he humanifies Shakespeare's fairies.
It's
your basic immortal dilemma. Whether Greek god or English fairy, if you live
outside the constraints of time, you face no worries about life and death,
perhaps no mortal questions at all. Maybe, for immortals, change—permanent
change, not merely the passing of one entertainment for another—is the final
novelty? Having change happen to you, say, by falling into love, is a human
experience new to Titania. But it happens to her through Oberon's present of a
small human boy:
The child grew, and
changed, and became ever more delightful to her, and she imagined that they
could go on forever like that. . . . Maybe it would have been better if he had
stayed her favorite thing—a toy and not a son. . . . But one evening the boy
ran back to her, and climbed upon her throne, and put his face to her breast,
and sighed a word at her, molly or moony or middlebury—she still didn't know what it was exactly. But it was
close enough to mommy to ruin
everything.
Wedded to love is death. Adrian's
Oberon and Titania and their beloved boy end up in a leukemia ward with Doctors
Beadle and Blork. There the fairies run against the intransigence of nature for
humans: you want change but can't do anything about it. It would have been easy
if the boy had merely been a "broken toy," but, as Titania discovers,
human love of whatever variety is a terrible enchantment.
Titania's love for her boy
changes her perception of what is available to her—and what is not: "The
mortals all looked equally boring to her, equally plain, and equal wastes of
her time. She had never thought before of anything as a waste of time; she had
an eternity of time to spend and could afford to be profligate with it." Her
love might, ultimately, lead her to a realization plenty difficult for humans
too; that other people besides yourself, people perhaps plain, or old, or poor,
or clumsy, feel deep love and howl for its loss.
Oberon is a fainter
character—as is the intriguingly named but missing master of the human revels,
Jordan Sasscock. (As a well-trained Dickens reader, I was plumping for Dr.
Sasscock to turn out to be Oberon, but then I remembered he appears briefly in The Children's Hospital, so apparently
not.) The magicked humans, Molly, Henry, and Will, have been left out of this
review, but through no lack of charm of their own in their Dickensianly
interlaced plots.
Parts of the novel left me
bewildered, especially as I tried to work out the implications of the many references
to the culty film Soylent Green. The homeless crazies in Buena Vista Park put on a
musical version that culminates with the fabulous song "People who eat
people are the loneliest people in the world!" But surely bewilderment is
a handmaiden of enchantment. Reading The
Great Night was an extraordinary experience. When I finished it, I started
it over again.
[Editor's Note: An earlier version of this review incorrectly cited The Children's Hospital as Chris Adrian's first novel.]
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