Doctor's Debut Novel is Epic, Satisfying
Verghese Shows He Can Write Fiction as Well as Moving Non-Fiction
Apr 22, 2009
There really hasn’t been much of a question about Abraham Verghese’s ability to write.
His first two books — both nonfiction — were filled with masterful sentences, elegant scenes, moving passages. My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story about AIDS in Tennessee and The Tennis Partner, a brutally honest story of a difficult relationship showed that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s decision to give him an MFA was the right one.
Quest With Emotional Pull
Besides being a writer, Verghese is a doctor currently on the faculty at Stanford and his third book, his first novel, is filled with moments of mastery.
Cutting for Stone (Knopf. February 2009. ISBN 978-0-375-41449-7), a novel that seems to combine the reach of John Irving with the emotional pull of Lorrie Moore or Anne Tyler, centers on Marion Praise Stone and travels with him from Ethiopia to India to New York as he undertakes a quest to find out more about his family
Stone and his twin brother, Shiva, were the children of a Thomas Stone, a British surgeon and Sister Mary Joseph Praise, whom he met when she was traveling from India to Yemen and she saved his life. While she declines his original invitation to join him in Ethiopia, she joins him after confronting evil, settling at the Missing Hospital; so named by someone mispronouncing Mission Hospital.
She dies delivering their children and Stone, once he hears of her death, abandons them, leaving the children orphaned.
Complicated but Never Convoluted
The story then shifts to the brothers, their coming of age in Ethiopia where the share a bed into their teens, sleeping with their heads touching each other as they had been in their mother’s womb.
They get older, become doctors, Shiva betrays Marion over a woman and Marion flees, settling at an overcrowded New York hospital. Illness eventually forces a reunion not just with Shiva but with their father.
And, as with an Irving novel, despite the many characters and plot threads, Verghese’s writing remains clear, the plot complicated but never convoluted.
The novel’s title comes from the Hippocratic oath: “I will not cut for stone even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.”
While the phrase does a little toward explaining the main characters — certainly their name — it does leave the reader wondering while cutting for stone may not be such a good idea, would it have been so terrible for Verghese to cut a little for clarity.
Ambitious Novel
Verghese has written a very ambitious novel and he should be applauded not only for what he tried to do but for what he accomplished. At the same time, though Verghese can unfurl page after page of seamless prose, there are times where he insists in telling us too many details, too much about his characters.
From the Stone brothers to the woman who works in the bar across the street from the hospital, Verghese seemingly wants us to know everything about everybody.
And while they are undoubtedly fascinating characters, it has the effect of bringing everything to a crashing halt.
Still, Verghese has written a wonderful book that satisfies immeasurably.
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