The Healing art
Chris Bohjalian sets another novel in the gray area where `do no harm' becomes a legal question

Author: By Jessica Treadway

Date: SUNDAY, January 24, 1999

Page: G1

Section: Books

The Law Of Similars
By Chris Bohjalian. Harmony Books. 275 pp. $23.

If a man who knows he has a potentially lethal allergy to cashew nuts wakes up in the middle of the night, goes downstairs to the kitchen, and eats one, is he attempting suicide? Or is it possible that he believes the nut will -- instead of killing him -- restore him to health?

This question arises early on in Chris Bohjalian's engrossing new novel, ``The Law of Similars,'' which derives its title from the homeopathic tenet that ``likes are cured by likes.'' Give a sick person a tiny amount of whatever caused his symptoms in the first place, homeopaths advise, and the substance will stimulate the body's natural defenses and recuperative powers.

Founded at the turn of the 19th century by German physician Samuel Hahnemann, homeopathy is generally considered an alternative to conventional medicine, at least in the United States. Bohjalian -- whose last novel, ``Midwives,'' explored the often contentious divide between lay midwifery and modern obstetrics -- fixes his most recent focus on what happens in a small Vermont town when one of its residents consults the local homeopath and soon afterward, on Christmas Eve, launches himself into a cashew-induced coma.

The story is narrated by Leland Fowler, a young widower with a 4-year-old daughter. He also happens to be chief deputy state's attorney, which creates more than a slight conflict of interest when homeopath Carissa Lake, the woman Leland has just begun falling in love with, becomes a target of suspicion in the coma case.

This dramatic collision of characters might sound convenient or contrived, but in Bohjalian's deft hands it becomes an explosive convergence of people who do, indeed, inhabit a small world. Leland, Carissa, and the comatose man, Richard Emmons, all live in Bartlett, a fictional village 20 miles from Burlington. It is to the homey hills of East Bartlett, with its general store and ``small collection of houses, a church, and a general store'' that Leland returns each evening to pick up his daughter from day care, after another day of prosecuting wife beaters, petty thieves, and a man accused of hitting a street musician with his own saxophone for muffing a Cole Porter tune.

If Leland is gratified and sometimes bemused by the nature of his work, he's completely unprepared for his office to start investigating Carissa at the request of Jennifer Emmons, who has begun calling authorities from the hospital where her husband lies beyond recovery. For the first time since his wife's death in a car accident more than two years earlier, Leland feels happy -- even ``blessed,'' to use his word -- in his budding relationship with Carissa, whose homeopathic remedy of arsenic (in an infinitesimal dose) cured him almost immediately of a cold-like malaise that had plagued him for months.

When he realizes that Carissa faces possible charges in relation to Emmons's condition, Leland makes what he later describes as a ``litany of bad decisions,'' risking just about all he cherishes, to save her from prosecution. Told in retrospect, the novel is a good man's account of how and why he did wrong in the name of hope and love. By the time he begins his narrative, his life has been split into three parts, Leland observes, ``with a car accident and a cashew forming the two great divides.''

While Bohjalian is skilled at carrying the reader along on wings of traditional suspense -- piquing interest with an early teaser, then letting the details unfold -- he's at his best depicting the shape and texture of Leland's everyday life. The scenes with daughter Abby, a precocious child who brings an extra pair of underpants to a dinner party so she can dress the hosts' cat, are perhaps the most rich and sweet and real.

Such poignant humor laces the whole of Leland's tale. His own father, he tells us, made a small fortune from Green Mountain Grizzlies, his line of ``eccentrically dressed'' teddy bears favored by upscale toy stores around the country. ``No one suspected that my father's big idea of Desert Storm Grizzly was probably a sign of his oncoming Alzheimer's,'' Leland notes. ``After all, the camouflage-clad grizzly had been a huge success -- due at least in part to my father's suggestion that the teddy come equipped with a toy gas mask.''

Bohjalian's readers will find parallels between ``The Law of Similars'' and ``Midwives,'' his fifth book, which has become a paperback bestseller since its selection by Oprah Winfrey for her TV reading club. Both novels concern the legal ramifications faced by health practitioners when something goes terribly wrong with a patient's treatment, and narrators who take morally questionable actions based on emotion and instinct. Bohjalian packs a good deal of information about alternative medicine into both stories, which educate as they engage the reader in the characters' journeys of self-examination.

Both books also contain profoundly memorable scenes depicting the medical emergencies that serve as plot catalysts. Few who read ``Midwives'' will forget the death of Charlotte Bedford in childbirth during a perilous ice storm. The same is true of the central drama in ``The Law of Similars,'' which conveys in vivid and breath-stopping detail the experience of Richard Emmons and his family when he wakes in the night, unable to breathe, and struggles to the kitchen to take the fatal bite. While Bohjalian did a good job depicting the psyche of a 14-year-old girl in ``Midwives,'' he seems to have hit his literary stride with Leland Fowler, whose voice is intimate, credible, and sure in illuminating the shadows of his soul. Readers who tend to be interrupted should think twice before starting this novel. Once opened, ``The Law of Similars'' is a hard book to put down.