"A Better Angel" by Chris Adrian

nik.mercer — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:32:11 -0700

The world of Chris Adrian’s fiction is one between Heaven and Hell, where virtue and perversity never exist isolated from the other. Frequently his protagonists are children both precocious and profane, or older characters suffering from chronic, terminal, or mysterious illness. He has so far published two novels, Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital, both informed by his concurrent careers as a working pediatrician and a divinity student. Now nine of his short stories, previously published in venues like The New Yorker, Tin House, Esquire, and McSweeney’s are collected in a new book, A Better Angel.

Trauma and illness are the main motifs of these stories, and his cast of doctors, patients, and abandoned children are dealing with the consequences of having lost all illusions. The narrator of “A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death,” for example, is a young girl named Cindy with short-gut syndrome who has spent much of her life in hospitals. “There are some orthopedic kids in traction,” she tell us, sizing up some of her neighbors in the pediatric ward, “a couple of wheezers smoking their albuterol bongs, a tall, thin, blond girl sitting up very straight in bed and reading one of those…Narnia books. She has CF written all over her.” In these situations pretensions fall away by necessity, and the polite conventions of normal interaction disintegrate in the face of bare life.

Historical trauma is also a theme. The specter of the September 11 attacks haunts several stories, as does the Civil War. Both events seem here to be taken as having induced upon whole generations the anguish of personal tragedy.

But this is not to say that Adrian’s work is hopeless. Though a couple of the selections in this book are grim to the point of unpleasantness, beneath is all his characters are animated by a hope in a power beyond their own powers to grieve and suffer. Supernatural or divine elements like angels and spirit voices appear in the book, and while they are never unambiguous forces of good—in fact, they tend to be creepy and possibly dangerous—they at least hint at a life beyond the failing blood and bone of mortality. The afterlife, as one character dreams of it, is “a place without loneliness and desire; without rage, without disappointment.”

For all the thematic richness in his work, it would be an injustice not to mention also the technical ability Adrian shows in his prose. Symbolic structures govern some stories, such as “The Sum of Our Parts,” in which the spirit of a woman, comatose after a suicide attempt, roams the halls of her hospital, seeing into the minds and hearts of a group of oncology technicians whose unexpressed or unrequited bonds of affection exist in contrast to the severe precautionary behavior they must keep to avoid exposing themselves to the samples of bodily fluids they have to deal with.

In many other stories, Adrian masterfully sustains the narrative voice that has become his trademark, straddling a difficult line between insouciance and care that could easily tip one way or the other into nihilistic parody or maudlin mush. Take this passage for instance, from the title story: “Better to be a garbageman than a doctor, when your father gets sick. If I were a tree surgeon or a schoolteacher or a truffle-snuffler, or even a plain old junkie, then sickness would be just sickness, just something to be borne and not something I was supposed to defeat….Even if I hadn’t cheated my way through medical school, the task of recalling the lost knowledge of pathology from second year would have been beyond me. I make my living praising the beauty of well children. I love babies and I love ketamine, and that’s really why I became a pediatrician, not because I hate illness, or really ever wanted to make anybody better, or even convinced myself that I could.”

The only times Adrian comes close to misstepping is when a story tends so much toward allegory that the characters lose their place in the internally consistent reality of their setting. This happens mainly in “The Vision of Peter Damien,” when the September 11 attacks become a disruption not only of history, but of time itself. In that story the televisual images of September 11 afflict the children of a small town in what resembles the nineteenth century. But the images are rendered so literally as to threaten the collapse of the reader’s trust in the setting, as if it were a Philip K. Dick story, rather than enact such images’ effect on a young psyche, as I suspect was the author’s intent.

On the whole, however, A Better Angel is as deeply impressive a collection as one could hope for from an author so young, whose best work is surely yet to come.

Buy A Better Angel