Welcome to medical magic realism
The Children's Hospital
By Chris Adrian
McSweeney's, 615 pp., $24
Chris Adrian burst into the world of fiction in the 1990 s with stories published in small literary magazines and also in that big one , The New Yorker. The narrators of these brilliant short works all yearn to reverse death. They become chummy with angels who walk the earth, often broken-winged and outlandishly dressed. Every story presents some or many of the following: a brother who, though dead, is audible and occasionally visible; an impaired physician; a killing (sometimes murder); the comforts of substance use; illnesses, often gruesome; congenital defects; and injuries, sometimes received on the battlefield.
Had enough? I hope not. For this is a writer of prodigious talent who holds your heart in his hands. (They are youthful, gloved hands: Adrian is a pediatrician not yet 40, currently attending divinity school.) Despite or because of his obsessively repeated subject matter, he is a writer of enormous charm. And despite or because of his unlikely world view, he is irresistible. He sails into the inexplicable, seeking meaning; and the reader, gripped by curiosity and admiration, scrambles on board.
Adrian is master of detail. Trusting our ability to recognize type, he plucks characters from their type and adds enough specifics to bring us face to face with an individual. Conversations reveal personality; sometimes they include elliptical pronouncements. ``Gob's Grief," his first novel, set during and after the Civil War, presents a portrait of Walt Whitman tending sick soldiers, whispering loving farewells. ``Gob's Grief" presents also an ultimately tedious description of the construction and reconstruction of a machine to return the dead to life. In the novel's penultimate summation Adrian writes: `` A man is such a piece of work that there can be no end to him." No death.
It is this wish or perhaps conviction that presides over ``The Children's Hospital." The book's heroine, Jemma, having lost brother, parents, and lover to suicide, illness, and accident, has concluded that she brings death to those she loves. As the book begins, this sad and maladroit young woman, enduring an obstetrical rotation in her third year of medical school, witnesses the birth of a malformed girl, ``the expression of a jumble of chromosomal additions and deletions so unique that she was her very own syndrome . . . too long and too short, too wide and too thin, with things that were not eyes where her eyes ought to have been, and a cuttlefish mouth." Let this one quote stand for Adrian's gift of describing the pitiable with both general and precise information, and for his disdain of pathos. He does not demand our sympathy; we can offer it on our own.
Jemma follows the team escorting the newborn from the main hospital to the attached children's hospital , and immediately the children's hospital finds itself floating on a sea that now covers the planet. It alone has survived a world wide deluge. The floating building, containing all its patients and whichever staff and students and volunteers and parents were within the walls when the flood occurred, now organizes itself around what is still its primary purpose: treating sick children. And for a while it seems that this is the tale: people putting aside their grief and doing the job at hand.
Then the offhand and almost helpless Jemma gets saddled with the power to heal. She performs miracles while cool narration points out the physiology she confronts and the pathology she corrects, giving us enough data to clarify but not so much as to baffle. We are slightly distant witnesses, protected from recoil or collapse. Adrian's prose here is writing at its best -- medical magical realism, you might call it.
Jemma cures all the patients in the hospital, and a few adults, too. She harrows the place -- this verb is used more than once, reminding us that Christ harrowed hell: robbed it, saved the souls of the righteous. The hospital becomes a cruise ship: healthy adults, healthy children, exercise classes, talent shows. Then things change, and change again, always toward darkness and disorder. This novel, bulging with plagues, cannibalism, widespread comas, angelic commentary, and resurrections, sometimes taxes our patience, though it never depresses our spirits. Jemma -- first shunned and then reviled and then deserted, accommodating to her odd environment, preparing to deliver her own baby -- joins a beloved sisterhood: unforgettable fictional heroines.
``Gob's Grief" is a good book, and ``The Children's Hospital" a very good one, though both require some indulgence from the reader. But several of Adrian's short stories are incomparable, requiring only that the transported reader remember to breathe. Adrian's fans -- there will be still more of them after the new book -- await whatever this extraordinary artist will do next. As a member of that eager crowd, I hope he will return from time to time to the compressed form , to implication and selection , to a parsimonious deployment of his powers in the service of small masterpieces. Still, whatever form he chooses, we will be lucky as long as he continues to write .
Edith Pearlman is the author of three collections of stories: ``Vaquita," ``Love Among the Greats," and ``How to Fall." 
