Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Deconstructed. Part One: How Edna Lustig raised her son to be a radical feminist.

By the time I reached ten years of age, my reputation around Lustig’s—my parent’s ladies’ clothing store on the corner of Front Street and Watchung in bustling, post-War Plainfield, New Jersey—was firmly established. I was “Edna’s boy,” not a pejorative term as it might be used to describe a servant in India; rather, a useful description of my social standing, and one I was proud of, whether I was vacuuming the carpets in the two-story retail establishment, or downstairs in the back room, folding store boxes.

Yes, of course, I was also “Phil’s boy.” I recall my father instructing me that every garment sold at Lustig’s must be lovingly folded and wrapped in white tissue paper, then placed in a “Lustig’s box,” which displayed our family name which appeared like elegant handwriting alongside the silhouette of a stylishly-dressed lady walking a tiny poodle with a poofed tail.

The point of my parent’s business was not lost on me. It was predicated on treating customers with respect, deference, even loving care. That was always our mission at Lustig’s. It made no sense to me why anyone would purchase high quality clothing for someone he or she didn’t love, even in the case of a woman purchasing the clothing for herself. Wasn’t that done out of self-love? To me that seemed perfectly reasonable.

One sign of true love I know is one’s willingness to let someone go any moment he or she wishes to be free. Love always withers in an atmosphere of oppression. I never understood the appeal of controlling others. As a child I learned, “We love with open hands” by example from those around me—my father, my mother, my relatives. I never once heard anyone ever sermonize on the subject. My Jewish religion taught me there was no problem or challenge that could not and should not be addressed by education. Every person should be revered by being encouraged to rise to the highest echelon possible in this life.

Every one of these attitudes, beliefs and life lessons was mirrored by my Jewish religion that I grew up in; however, starting off, I had no need for religion because Edna Lustig was my teacher, in a way, my rabbi. In the Jewish religion, another word for teacher can be “rabbi;” and, after all, I was “Edna’s boy.”

Did I grow up to be a radical feminist? Not particularly, I’d say, even if I claimed to be that in the title. Now at my advanced age, I remain someone who’s never been above cleaning a toilet, mopping a floor, or cooking a dinner. There is absolutely no reason why home keeping chores can’t and shouldn’t be fairly split among those who make the mess and eat the food.

I don’t consider myself worthy of a medal or of any particular distinction. By this point I would hope all men are striving for new attitudes about cooking, making art, sewing, loving others and maintaining loving friendships with other men. By the way, it was my grandmother Celia who first taught me to sew.

As much as I give my mother, Edna Lustig, credit for helping me form these attitudes, in the end, I believe each of us learns from each relationship what each of us chooses to learn. Well, at least, now you know what I chose to learn from being “Edna’s boy.”

It looks as though I set out to write an appreciation of Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry, but given what that novel is and how effectively it arouses the animus of women and people like me held down too long; and at the same time, given how effectively Lessons in Chemistry skewers typical male attitudes of that former era (the 1950s) and the one we live in now, I thought it necessary this month to make clear where I stand on these matters. Next month? Deconstructing Lessons in Chemistry, Part II.

One of my favorite ads from the 1960s appeared in the New York City subways when Congresswoman Bella Abzug was running for re-election to the U.S. Congress. The visual was a photo of the Congresswoman speaking from a podium equipped with hundreds of microphones. The ad headline? “This woman’s place is in The House.”

Of Ann Patchett and Ralph Lauren.

In the title of this month's essay, I juxtapose the name of a well-known, bestselling novelist (who recently published her ninth novel entitled Tom Lake) with that of a super-celebrity fashion designer whose business is easily worth billions. What could those two names have in common? My assertion: They both use branding to pull off their success. Yes, Ann Patchett, the darling of the literary world, used branding techniques to drive her latest novel to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.

In the case of Ralph Lauren, his organization might photograph a model wearing the designer's dress or blazer in an exclusive setting, aboard a yacht, or at a social club in Manhattan. The photo's background puts establishment Americana on display. We interpret it as not only upscale, but also authentically American. Why not add in a historic American flag from the War of 1812, or a yacht-racing trophy won in the early 1900s. That's how Lauren achieves a double rub-off effect. His brand is buoyed up as it captures both the essence of upscale and the essence of Americana at the same time.

But that's a fashion ad. How could a renowned, best-selling novelist such as Ann Patchett use the rub-off effect in her novel?

How many of you know of a theatrical play entitled Our Town by Thornton Wilder first produced in 1938? A show of hands, please? Our Town is not only one of the best loved, and utterly heart-rendering American plays ever written; it also captures the essence of growing up in rural New England. For generations, it's been produced so often by so many high school and university drama groups and studied by so many American literature and drama students, that Our Town and the characters in the play and many of the events that happen in it are iconic. I contend that the play content is written on the DNA of what it means to be American.

I readily admit this has nothing to do with Texas, and everything to do with capturing a prototypical "back East, establishment" America. Not to be forgotten: Over the last forty years, the Lauren organization has also extensively mined the imagery of The Old West. For decades, until cigarette advertising was outlawed, one could hardly tell the difference between a Marlboro ad and a Ralph Lauren jeans ad.

Our Town captures the essence of everything honest, true, New England, and by extension, American values.

Ann Patchett's newest novel, Tom Lake, uses the play Our Town as chief analog, metaphor, and prop. It's the backdrop of her novel as much as a quaint New England harbor setting, or a rodeo might be used as the cultural backdrop of a Ralph Lauren ad. There's a second marketing icon being served up that is also extrmerly appealing: Tapping into the world of wannabe famous and journeyman actors playing summer stock in regional theaters across our United States.

In addition, in Tom Lake, we have our first-person narrator weaving a tale that everyone would recognize from our recent past: It takes place during Covid lock-down, when her three grown daughters return home to pick the family cherry orchard harvest in Upper Peninsula Michigan. During Covid, agricultural workers (read: migrant workers) were extremely scarce, so the story angle of daughters coming home to save the cherry harvest is both plausible and appealing.

The opening pages of the novel gives us the first-person narrator's account of how at about fifteen years of age, she was selected to help organize the auditions for a local theatrical group's production of Our Town.

In the opening pages of the novel, we learn—it's very funny—not only were most of the auditions horribly bad, but their poor quality convinced our fourteen year old narrator to try out for the part of Emily. She is immediately given the role.

Ann Patchett weaves her tale around two different productions of Our Town that our cherry-orchard-owning mother played in. She tells her daughters her story of playing opposite this not-quite-famous actor in summer stock theater years later as they're all harvesting cherries. By the way, not only did she immediately win the part in the community theater production in New Hampshire; she then goes on to be recommended by the director for summer stock production in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and also for a Hollywood film that—after a lot of back and forth—eventually is made and released. She was not intended to be the star of that film, but due to her looks and talent, and much to the chagrin of the intended Hollywood star, she steals the movie. Early buzz about the movie? Everybody in Hollywood can't stop talking about the performance she put in.

That's how Tom Lake becomes an Our Town writ large: A regional, summer stock production staged in "The Tom Lake Region" of Michigan, our Emily in Our Town  begins an affair with an at-the-time newbie actor who goes on to become a very famous Hollywood movie star. Well, somehow, from the way our story-telling mom tells the story to her daughters who are still harvesting their blessed cherries during Covid, one of the daughters gets the idea that perhaps her father was this big movie star and not her actual father.

It's all so crazy, all so unlikely, yet I must confess, I love it. I eat it up. Every bit of it. I can't get enough. Even the part about a mother going on to her grown daughters about the soon-to-be famous actor boyfriend she was sleeping with that summer. Like the mother's cherry-picking daughters who can't stop listening, we readers of this novel can't stop reading...or picking out favorite cherries of our own to gorge on.

Tom Lake wallows in celebrity. The novel dwells in our unshakable fascination with celebrity along with our love of Our Town, and Yankee-New England rural stereotypes (never mind that most of it takes place in rural Michigan). It tugs at our American heartstrings.

And that's how Tom Lake sucks you in--innocuously, innocently--and makes you want to believe. Hey! I might as well have been daydreaming over a Ralph Lauren Polo advertisement, except that reading Tom Lake is far more engaging. And that's how Tom Lake uses marketing positioning and the rub-off effect to maximize delicious story-telling.

By the way, this is not the first time Ann Patchett has referenced other artworks in her novels so she can discuss the magical aspects of how art works on us and opens us up to meaningful experiences.

I've only read one of Ann's other novels, Commonwealth. In Tom Lake, I can attest, the art analog is so much more convincing because Our Town is such a beloved, authentic, and rich American play; because celebrity is a never-ending source of fascination for us all; and because the daughters coming home to rescue the cherry harvest tugs at our heartstrings.

"Please Forgive Me."

Can you imagine living in a world where no one ever says to anyone else, "I was wrong to treat you that way. I'm truly sorry. Please forgive me."

I can. In fact, as much as I may not like to admit it, that world comes uncomfortably close to describing the one in which we currently live, where obvious bad actors invariably plead, "Not Guilty, Your Honor!" and never bother to comprehend the depth of suffering they might have caused others even when they're clearly guilty as sin.

In Lucian Childs' Dreaming Home, we're presented with a series of linked short stories that play out in this all-too familiar world. Although bad actors are rarely made to take responsibility for the suffering they inflict on others, we, as readers of Childs' smart, talented and evocative stories, come to love his characters' noble, sensitive, and beautiful traits. No, we don't get to escape the hatred, violence and sadness they endure; but, by reading Childs' fiction we learn that these Dreaming Home characters are made of far nobler stuff than we might have at first thought.

In the opening story a twelve-year-old girl by the name of Tiana exposes her older brother, Kyle, the principal protagonist, to their father's fury by showing him Kyle's notebook filled with sketches he's copied from a male pornography magazine.

In the second story, the father, a Vietnam Vet with PTSD—also a confirmed fundamentalist homophobe—has enrolled Kyle in a program supposedly designed to "cure" him of his homosexuality through a rigorous program of scripture study. Yet, some of the religious leaders in the program are practicing homosexuals who have been known to rape members.

This sounds brutal, right? It's not; it's anything but brutal because in the case of the first story Childs chooses to tell it not from Tiana's or Kyle's point of view, but from the P-O-V of Tiana's friend Rachel who's a typical twelve year old, therefore allowing the first story, which is entitled "Rachel" to open on this note: "We were having a Natalie Cole spring that April, my best friend Tiana and me. Practically wore the grooves off "Unpredictable." And we were in junior high. Finally. I was in Math Club, AP Algebra. I turned twelve on the sixteenth and had my first kiss. Everything was totally groovy."

In the second story, "The Boys in the Ministry," the horror of Kyle being held captive in an ultimately corrupt and abusive religious program is artfully transformed into extremely droll and entertaining fare when the story is told entirely in first-person-plural, a narrative "we" which takes in all the "boys" in this institution, which makes for a fun read.

Here's a description of the welcoming committee greeting newly arrived "boys:" "We thread our fingers into our belt loops. Hips cocked, glaring straight ahead, we plant ourselves on the sidewalk like our brothers and fathers would, feeling tough and perfectly righteous…"A muscle twitches in Brother Stalwart's manly face. He straight-arms his Bible out in front of him, creating a mighty heterosexual force field. "Stand strong in your truth, brothers. For we are one with them now."

Each story follows the development of Kyle as he goes from his twenties in one story to this thirties in the next. In each story, I can attest Lucian Childs pulls off an impressive feat of imagining, not only making each story intensely readable, but, in the process, delivering a life story with every bit of the emotional power one would usually expect to only find between the covers of a novel.

"Time After Time" in the novel, Cutting for Stone.

Listening to "Time After Time" sung by Cindy Lauper with brilliant lyrics by Robert Hyman, I'm aware that time in fiction can go all stretchy on you, and, if you're not careful, go off in many directions at once—backwards, forwards, even sideways. In addition, the stories that take place over time can, like a hamster yearning to be free, make a run for it. In the end, you might sit back and let them run because watching free-range stories play themselves out is way more fun than keeping them caged up. What good could come from trying to control them?

So witness the passage of time in Abraham Verghese's novel Cutting for Stone. The prologue looks back over a fifty-four-year-old life with the perspective of Marion born just yesterday, insisting, as a naïve surgeon he operate on a patient who's chances of living through the surgery are infinitesimally small. Marion's father Dr. Stone is present. "My father put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me gently, as if to a junior colleague rather than to his son. 'Marion, remember the Eleventh Commandment," he said. "Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient's death."

And then the author continues, as if chanting a poem, "I remember his [Dr. Stone's] words on full-moon nights in Addis Ababa when knives are flashing and rocks and bullets are flying, and when I feel as if I am standing in an abattoir and not in Operating Theater 3, my skin flecked with the grist and blood of strangers. I remember. But you don't always know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now… Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel."

So, in chapter one, Marion, whose voice narrates the entire work starts by recounting his mother's arduous voyage aboard a typhoid-plagued boat to Aden, then telescopes the next twenty years of his mother's life to a single paragraph. Notice how much is compressed in just a few words: "For the longest time all I knew was this: after an unknown period of time that could have been months or even a year, my mother, aged nineteen, somehow escaped Yemen, then crossed the Gulf of Aden, then went overland perhaps to a walled and ancient city of Harrar in Ethiopia, or perhaps to Djibouti, then from there by train she entered Ethiopia via Dire Dawa and then on to Addis Ababa."

Then, a few paragraphs later, Verghese skips over many additional years, and then picks up with, "In the ensuing seven years…Sister Mary Joseph Praise rarely spoke about her voyage, and never about her time in Aden." The next paragraph begins with, "Sister Mary Joseph Praise began the task of the rest of her days when she entered Operating Theater 3." At that moment neither Nun Sister Mary Joseph Praise, nor we, the readers, know that the Nun is seven month's pregnant and that in the next hour or so a horrible tragedy will unfold:

Dr. Stone, the surgeon who is acting obstetrician that day, will botch the delivery of his own twin children, Marion and Shiva, leading directly to the death of their mother, Nun Sister Mary Joseph Praise.

Hema, Missing Hospital's actual obstetrician, delayed returning from a trip home to visit her family in India, will return just in time to save the life of the second-born child, Shiva, but not in time to save Sister Mary Joseph Praise.

Meanwhile, everyone in the tight medical community of Missing Hospital will have no doubt who got the Sister pregnant. Missing is a mis-translation of the institution's actual name, Mission Hospital.

Finally, after Hema arrives back at Missing and relieves Dr. Stone of his obstetrician duties. Dr. Stone, the culprit, disappears without a word. During the course of the novel his name is mentioned from time to time, but he never makes an appearance. He's a totally absent father who, by virtue of not being there, has a strong presence throughout the rest of the novel.

Now Part Two of the novel begins. We're up to page one hundred-thirty-five. All those pages—the first ten chapters—have been used to describe the passage of a handful of hours, admittedly a day with extraordinary operatic drama on a level with Der Ring des Nibelungen. Time is seen—and we experience it—as if under a microscope.

Time in the remainder of the novel Cutting for Stone, from Chapter Eleven all the way up to Chapter Forty-two, which takes us from page 135 all the way to the final page, 657, is treated in a radically different manner. The way the final 500+ pages tell the story remind me of great fictional biographies from the past such as David Copperfield or Great Expectations. We see two newborn twins as they attract a mother and father (Hema becomes the adoptive mother and Dr. Abhi Ghosh, another Missing surgeon, becomes the boys' adoptive father.) Suddenly, time goes from being seen under a microscope to being seen more through a telescope.

I'm writing about the malleability of time in fiction, especially in Cutting for Stone, to point out how a writer can tell a single story while switching back and forth between a microscope and a telescope to serve the needs of a story, focusing on the most important parts, without wasting a word. I'm very familiar with this because I let time go "all stretchy" in my novel, Charging the Jaguar. The first number of chapters of my novel cover a few hours' time. After that opening, time passes more conventionally. But more about that later.

As with the song, "Time After Time," and it's most famous lyrical couplet, "If you fall, I will catch you," we learn to trust a narrator, such as Marion in "Cutting for Stone" when that narrator is always there for us, the readers, supporting us just as the author, Verghese, does as he zooms through decades in a single sentence and then takes ten chapters to tell what happens in the next few hours. In fiction,if you can convince your reader you'll always be there for her and never leave her confused about what's going on, you can have that reader following you avidly for more than six hundred pages.

The Cat With the Wandering Eye

Ellie, the cat with the wandering eye,

And the lingering thought, blinked,

Ventured out, and, in a flying leap, left us

And her companion, Homer,

Who stays at home and writes

Imaginary epic poems,

To visit the shadows somewhere,

To show us—all of us—her tail,

To show us she could pass through,

The door, one down from the door to Shangri-La,

To become the cat who never was,

Until she wasn't where you thought she was.

Rather, Ellie leaped into

The wanderlust to become,

The cat who left on holiday,

Ventured out to travel

From downtown to uptown,

Perhaps to catch a mouse,

But caught, instead,

The McKinney Avenue Trolley,

The car named "Daisy,"

That had come to us all the way,

From Buenos Aires,

Which, as luck would have it,

Was filled with tango-dancing cats

Packed in like oily sardines,

On their way, hither and non,

To visit aunts and cousins

Who lived in boxes and other rentals,

Elsewhere in the city.

Ellie deplaned just in time,

When the bicycle bell

Ching-a-linged like an iPhone

at Klyde Warren Park,

And there paid her visit,

To Miss Vera and Mr. B.,

Two cousins of perfection,

Loved ones who also shed,

Little objects of their affection.

Now, If only she would return to relate,

The true nature of worlds beyond doors,

Neighborhoods beyond Milky Ways,

Where one wears nothing at all,

And the wanderlust wishes for fall.

Let Us Now Praise Elizabeth Strout.

She grew up in rural Maine, largely self-taught, and when she sat down to write the novel that made her famous she swept aside all the nonsense she had picked up in school—that all of us were taught—about what literature should be; and in that simple, single courageous act, she separated the Red Sea from Dry Land. She created for herself a narrow trail that led over rocky ground even though gigantic walls of water were being held back on either side of her slender trail by immensely powerful forces. She refused to be distracted by all the babbling on both sides of her. She followed her trail.

It was almost as though she said to herself most novels make readers work way too hard to make sense of them and appreciate them. My novel will be effortless to read.

And it was almost as if she said to herself: Most novels do backflips to give readers a false impression they're 'real' or that they're close to non-fiction because they have plenty of characters, plenty of complicated relationships, plenty of people making poor decisions that, in the end, turn out poorly. Plenty of drama, in other words.

My novel? she mighjt have thought. No backflips. Everything spare. I refuse to hide the notion that my novels are what they are--fiction.

 

By the way, that's what makes most novels so complicated. Their authors are running around like scared rabbits trying to lie their way into Heaven; almost as if they're trying to run away from the truth that their novels are fiction by compulsively fabricating a bunch of lies. As if the reader has no idea what's going on. Give me a break.

And it's almost as if she said to herself, most novels try way too hard to get readers to feel the emotions of the characters. In my novel, emotions will ooze out between the words, but the words I use will never intellectualize what the character is feeling. The reader will know what character is feeling without having to be told in so many words.

I pledge never to waste even a single word intellectualizing emotions. My novel, and the story my novel tells, will feel completely comfortable with the fact that what is being told here is a story that lives inside a novel. I will not use a single sentence to try and convince the reader it's anything else.

My novel will quietly and patiently focus on its only principal character and honor her fully; for example, I will refuse to use words to describe the settings of my stories.

The settings of my novels will be so prosaic and so well known to the reader that no one will miss it when I don't waste a single word describing the setting.

In addition, my novel will refuse to use words to describe what my characters look like. Why? Because if it's a really good story, by the end, every good reader will be able to write a police bulletin description of what my main character looks like. So why waste words on descriptions which so easily could be at variance with what the reader is imagining in her mind.

This is how My name is Lucy Barton might have taken shape in Elizabeth Strout's mind:

"I know," thought Elizabeth, "I'll have my single character be a patient in a midtown Manhattan hospital that has a famous building right outside her hospital window, The Chrysler Building."

Everybody knows what a hospital room looks like, so I won't have to waste a single word describing it. Same goes for The Chrysler Building.

My character will be named Lucy Barton. She's come from rural Maine but now lives in Manhattan, just like me.

In the story, Lucy Barton's doctor has restricted her to her hospital room for a series of "tests." The facts are kept extremely vague and indefinite. Purposely so.

The only action that occurs: While she's in the hospital Lucy's mother comes to visit. Lucy hasn't seen her mom in years.

I ask you, Dear Reader of my ExcitingWriting essays: Imagine you've been admitted to a hospital for vague 'tests' and you suddenly have an uninvited visitor. It's your mother who you haven't seen for years.

What happens to your emotions? Is there anything that happens from there on out that isn't heavily laden with emotion? Of course not. Could it be your mother has already passed, and is visiting you from the Dead? That is certainly what occurs to me. In any case, emotions ooze out in the spaces between every word.

Fittingly, the novel is mostly dialogue between Lucy and her mother.

This is the novel Elizabeth Strout wrote while she was walking down a narrow rocky trail in rural Maine while on either side of her powerful forces were holding back immense walls of water.

It's called My Name is Lucy Barton. It's about 180 pages short. And it's effortless to read. Don't read it too fast. You might miss something... interesting.

Cutting for Abraham Verghese.

This is my appreciation of three-time best-selling novelist Abraham Verghese who, in 2009, then largely unknown, published a novel entitled Cutting for Stone, which relates the birth and life story of twins Marion and Shiva Stone who are the off-spring of surgical assistant and nun, Mary Joseph Praise, and the arrogant British surgeon, Dr. Thomas Stone who for many years had worked together as doctor-surgical assistant in Operating Theater #3 at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The actual name of the hospital is Mission Hospital, but a series of typographical errors and mistaken transcriptions led to its name "going missing" if you will. Thus, Missing Hospital is not a typographical error. In the novel, it is the name of the institution.

Not only was the nun and mother-to-be (Mary Joseph Praise) totally unaware she was eight months' pregnant when she went into labor and was wheeled into Operating Theater #3 at Missing Hospital, the twins' father-to-be, the same Dr. Thomas Stone who happened to be attending at the time, thoroughly botched the delivery resulting in the mother's death.

The twins' savior was Missing Hospital obstetrician Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha whose nickname is Hema. As the story began, she had been visiting her family back in India and was returning to Addis. Earlier that day she had survived a harrowing puddle-jumper emergency landing, to finally land at Addis Ababa Airport in the nick of time to arrive in Missing Operating Theater #3, and save the twins and—in the process—to become their savior, their guardian angel, and, most importantly the twins' adoptive mother.

As Hema arrives and rescues the children, the father, Dr. Stone, leaves. From then on, no one in the story has any idea exactly what happened to the arrogant and usually dependable Dr. Stone. When Hema relieves Dr. Stone in Operating Theater #3, he disappears. Goes missing. Have you noticed? A lot is missing in this novel.

Here's a paragraph that treats Dr. Stone's feelings at that moment: "Stone wanted to run away, but not from the children or from responsibility. It was the mystery, the impossibility of their existence that made him turn his back on the infants. He could only think of [their mother] Sister Mary Joseph Praise. He could only think of how she'd concealed this pregnancy…"

Well, excuse me, but that makes it sound as if this pregnancy was all the nun's fault. Nevertheless, Dr. Stone goes missing, no doubt all the while insisting on the impossibility of the children's existence. Isn't that classic denial?

What I've just described to you is everything that happens during Part One of Cutting for Stone, the first 131 pages of the novel.

One additional thought: The entire novel is narrated by the voice of Marion, the second-born twin. The first page of the novel, The Prologue, entitled "The Coming," opens, "After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother's womb, my brother, Shiva and I came into the world in the late afternoon of…"

When John Irving was my writing instructor at the University of Iowa, he made it very clear to all of us: A novelist knows it's time to kill off a character as soon as it's clear to the writer that the character has exhausted his or her purpose in the story. If I had been better informed at the time, I would have spoken up in that class, yes, raised my arm and said, "Hey, that's no different from when a Mafioso don decides to knock off one of his soldiers—no further purpose in the family story."

I want you to know, despite all my superior education in the illusive arts of storytelling, when I reached page 131 in Cutting for Stone I was beside myself with grief. I was tearing up. Crying. Well, to be accurate, bawling. Why? I wanted the reclusive Dr. Stone and Hema to own up to what they had brought into to this world, and together take responsibility as parents of their newborn children. Of course that would have made a sentimental, mushy novel. It just shows you what happens when a novelist like me reads a beautifully crafted novel like that. My brain turns to mush because, while reading it, I wasn't a novelist; I was a reader. And that's what we readers do—excessively. We misunderstand, and then we are enlightened by our novelist who acts as our guide taking us on a quest to uncover the real story.

What did Abraham Verghese, the novelist have in mind when, as of page 131 of his 658-page novel, Dr. Stone went missing, and Mary Joseph Praise (page 127) "lay lifeless and unburdened of the two lives she had carried, as if that had been her sole earthly purpose." Abraham Verghese never had any intention of "getting the parents" together. His purpose has to do with artistically replicating what so often happens in real life.

How often have you read novels about missing fathers and the search for missing fathers? In real life, that condition is epidemic and traumatic. It often turns children into artists and launches them on a never-ending quest for what might have been but never was. And how many novels have you read or heard about that begin when a parent figure is dead or has just died? How about the opening of Hamlet, where since the King of Denmark has died, his ghostly presence haunts his castle's ramparts nightly, upsetting the night sentries. How about the opening of Albert Camus' The Outsider: "My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

Just as Abraham is Cutting for Stone in his novel, I'm cutting for Abraham's deeper artistic intentions in his novel, which I'll cover later this month, in my next EWA. (It was my honor to meet Dr. Verghese at Iowa in 2011.)