Suggestions: August 2007 Book of the Month

In her fourth novel (after Virgin Blue, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Falling Angels), Tracy Chevalier returns to her most successful format, spinning a lush, rich back story behind a famous masterpiece about which little is known. While it compares favorably with her acclaimed masterpiece, Girl with a Pearl Earring, this beautifully imagined and boldly told novel stands proudly on its own merits. Chevalier's greatest strengths as a writer come from her keen ability to re-create a time and place, in this case 15th-century France and Belgium. She interweaves narratives of the painter who conceived the six famous images, the tapissier who weaved them onto cloth, and the women in both artists' lives to create a magnificent historical novel that brings to life the enigmatic ladies of the tapestries, imagining their identities and circumstances, as well as the meaning of the tapestries about which little is actually known. This is rich territory for a writer to mine, and Chevalier shows all the impressive strengths of her previous novels. Wonderfully written, freshly conceived, and rich in the details of medieval life, The Lady and the Unicorn is another literary gem from one of our most successful and imaginative writers of historical fiction.

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Susan Wheeler is the protagonist of the novel. She is an attractive 23 year-old third-year medical student working as a trainee at Boston Memorial Hospital. Susan, along with four other students, George, Harvey, Geoffrey, and Paul, takes rounds in surgery rooms and ICU's for making post-treatment notations on the health of patients. Dr. Mark Bellows, a surgery resident in the hospital, is the instructor and supervisor of this group. The book takes us into a journey of the inner workings in a hospital. As these students complete their three-month surgical rotation, the dilemmas and problems faced by a woman in a so-called "man's" profession are also highlighted. There are two patients, Nancy Greenly and Sean Berman, who mysteriously went into comas immediately after their operations. These incidents were attributed to complications within their surgeries due to anesthesia. Nancy Greenly became comatose when her brain did not receive sufficient oxygen during surgery. Similarly, Sean Berman, a young man in his thirties with good physical conditions, underwent a knee operation that he was scheduled for. Despite the operation being a success, Sean failed to regain consciousness. Medically, the odds for such occurrences are one in a hundred thousand, however, such odds seemed resolutely higher at the Boston Memorial Hospital. Baffled by the comas of these two patients, Susan decides to investigate the mystery behind these peculiar events. She delves into the details on Nancy's medical history, occasionally skipping her lectures and missing rounds. After unraveling various details and facts relating to the case histories, Susan is led on to the Jefferson Institute. The Institute is hailed as an intensive care facility designed to cut down on heavy medical costs. All patients who are declared brain dead or "vegetables," as doctors call them, are referred to the institute. Here, she finds that bodies are suspended from the ceiling by wires in rooms walled by glass and are moved from room to room with little human involvement. This is where the "patients" are kept until a call for an organ of a certain type comes in, at which time the right donor is prepared, and the organ of choice is removed surgically (and without consent) and sold on the human organ market. Susan also discovers that the complication of prolonged coma after anesthesia has been around one hundred times more prevalent at Boston Memorial than the rest of the country in the past year. Shocked and aghast, Susan plans to discover more. She realizes that dressing up as a nurse leaves her free to roam about any part of the hospital, and allow her to uncover more of the mystery. However, Dr. Howard Stark, Chief of the Department of Surgery at Boston Memorial, soon realizes that Susan now knows more than she ought. Subsequently, she is chased, shot at, and almost crushed by an oncoming train in the course of her investigation. Dr. Stark, frightened that the well-hidden, gruesome facts about the hospital may soon be revealed, decides to put Susan in a coma as well after an appendix operation. One-by-one, all the horrid deeds and organ-trading secrets of the hospital are uncovered.

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When DeLillo's novel Players was published in 1977, one of the main characters, Pammy, worked in the newly built World Trade Center. She felt that "the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light." DeLillo's new novel begins 24 years later, with Keith Neudecker standing in a New York City street covered with dust, glass shards and blood, holding somebody else's briefcase, while that intimation of the building's mortality is realized in a sickening roar behind him. On that day, Keith, one half of a classic DeLillo well-educated married couple, returns to Lianne, from whom he'd separated, and to their young son, Justin. Keith and Lianne know it is Keith's Lazarus moment, although DeLillo reserves the bravura sequence that describes Keith's escape from the first tower—as well as the last moments of one of the hijackers, Hammad—until the end of the novel. Reconciliation for Keith and Lianne occurs in a sort of stunned unconsciousness; the two hardly engage in the teasing, ludic interchanges common to couples in other DeLillo novels. Lianne goes through a paranoid period of rage against everything Mideastern; Keith is drawn to another survivor. Lianne's mother, Nina, roils her 20-year affair with Martin, a German leftist; Keith unhooks from his law practice to become a professional poker player. Justin participates in a child's game involving binoculars, plane spotting and waiting for a man named "Bill Lawton." DeLillo's last novel, Cosmopolis, was a disappointment, all attitude (DeLillo is always a brilliant stager of attitude) and no heart. This novel is a return to DeLillo's best work. No other writer could encompass 9/11 quite like DeLillo does here, down to the interludes following Hammad as he listens to a man who "was very genius"—Mohammed Atta. The writing has the intricacy and purpose of a wiring diagram. The mores of the after-the-event are represented with no cuteness—save, perhaps, the falling man performance artist. It is as if Players, The Names, Libra, White Noise, Underworld—with their toxic events, secret histories, moral panics—converge, in that day's narrative of systematic vulnerability, scatter and tentative regrouping.

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In the major-league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the state of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A's, he said good-bye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big-league glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits-drinking, drugs, and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa. In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder. With no physical evidence, the prosecution's case was built on junk science and the testimony of jail house snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to DEATH ROW. If you believe in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you.

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Who's testing whom? When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he is forced to confront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. Scientists speculate that the Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, its purpose in doing so unknown.

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alexander.ix said:

could we add any book we like? not only just published?

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