Invisible Things
Frank Huyler
(Picador)
They met in medical school, she with her "long brown legs, her shorts and running shoes, her small firm hand on her page of notes." As two residents, they lived through "the long nights of call ... the vast white lights of the wards --- so many notes, so many nursing stations, lectures, presentations; so many fevers and so much flesh, in light and dark, back and forth and back again..." "Back and forth, back and forth..." Are we talking about their residency or their honeymoon?
Understand, we've had novels that take some time to get breathing, moving around, live. The Romance of the Rose is famous for its initial seventy-five pages of wanderlust, and any of us who take on Henry James, William Makepeace Thackeray or Anthony Trollope as a hobby know that we have to be prepared for long and difficult births. But these writers know how to parse a good phrase, how to bring us into their consciousness artfully, how to write dialogue. Huyler, on the other hand, needs a full life-support system from the get-go: his characters, at least Michael and his new love Nora, suffer from premature anestrus: Nora looked at him, amused, and ran her hand through her hair. "He told me," she said, with a hint of a smile. "I was out with a friend. She's married and has two kids." He looked down at his plate. "Was that a subtle way of asking if I'm involved with anyone?" she said, smiling at him openly now. He laughed uncomfortably and looked up at her. "Yes," he admitted. "I suppose it was." She nodded. "I'm not," she said. "I've had a few serial boyfriends and left the last one approximately a year ago." A serial boyfriend? Is this first cousin to a serial killer? Or serialism?
It is rare that this reviewer actually throws a new volume across the room and gets it, plop! into the trash-can on the very first shot. Usually it takes two or three tries. The Laws of Invisible Things however, had exactly the right heft to make a perfect basket, worthy of Kobe Bryant. Maybe it's all those heavy encomiums from The New York Times, the Economist, The Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) littering the book's back cover."I was at your house again," he said. "Your father said you were out with a high school friend."
My Mum taught us kids never to waste anything, not even a lousy book. So later in the day, I disinterred The Laws of Invisible Things from the trash box, even managed to finish it, albeit at breakneck speed.I must now confess that, despite my earlier, hasty distaste for it, it has one microscopic redeeming virtue. That is, the medical passages are dandy.
When Huyler gets into the emergency room, or begins killing off his poor beleaguered hero, or any of the other characters, the novel takes off.
For instance, Michael's partner, Dr. Gass, goes into cardiac arrest, though presumably not from reading this book; and if you want to know why you must take your blood-pressure medication every day, read page 177 about how they beat up cardiac patients in the ER to try to keep them alive. "The bedclothes were gone, pulled to the foot of the bed. Gass lay naked upon it, so white he seemed nearly translucent. Already his fingers and toes were blue. The catheter ran up from the floor into his penis, which lay wrinkled and gray and small, stained by the Betadine."
- [The male nurse] towered over the body, rhythmically driving the heels of his hands into Gass's chest again and again, the chest bending under the force of it again and again ... Michael saw something give beneath the man's thick hands, and there was a faint sound, like green wood broken underwater.
"I'm popping ribs," the man said, to no one in particular.
If you can slip around the lard-like love passages, the sick and the dying are presented in rich and meaty fashion. Yum.