Literature & Medicine: Must Reads
by Margery Y. Irvine ::: bio
Margery Irvine has facilitated several different Literature & Medicine groups in Maine over the past eight years. She is currently facilitating for Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, the very first hospital to be involved in Literature & Medicine.
Let Us Now Praise Infamous Men
Every facilitator who makes the book selections for Literature & Medicine programs has heard it: “Who picked THIS book?” Often accompanied by gestures of disdain and tones of derision, the question forces us to ’fess up: “ I did.” (And I had a good reason at the time.)
Not everyone, of course, will like every book. Drama (especially Greek tragedy), dense scholarly works, difficult authorial “voices”—these are often hard sells. On the other hand, the books that everyone loves frequently lead to discussions that never really take off, that remain mired in remembering and re-reading favorite passages.
Occasionally I choose a book that provokes downright animosity on the part of participants. But often, these have been the books that lead to the liveliest discussions and that have become touchstones to which we return year after year. I propose them here as “must-reads” not without trepidation: be prepared to suffer a lot of slings and arrows. But by the end of the discussion of these choices, often is heard the comment we all prize: “I never would have read this book on my own, and this discussion has really opened up for me a new way of looking at things.”
So here, for your consideration, are three novels with difficult (male) protagonists who will challenge, bother, annoy, even outrage—and will never be forgotten.
Benedict Lambert, the protagonist of biologist Mawer’s novel, claims to be a distant relative of Gregor Mendel. A geneticist by profession, a dwarf by. . . accident? a twist of fate? an errant gene? , Benedict is consumed by his quest to discover the genetic marker responsible for his deformity.
There’s a fair amount of science in this book, but that’s not what presents readers with problems, especially in a Literature & Medicine program. No, what they really really dislike is Benedict himself. It’s not hard to see why: although never self-pitying, Benedict is bitter, angry, acerbic, sarcastic. Contemptuous of most people, he may appear charming and good-humored, but his thoughts are very dark. The book revolves around two poles: his quest for an explanation of his deformity, and his quest for acceptance and love. Although he succeeds in the first, his relationship with Jean Piercey, a married librarian, presents him with choices that many readers find difficult if not impossible to accept or understand.
Our discussion ranged from paradigms of fate, to the impact of handicap and deformity, to the limits of forgiveness. A few of us professed almost boundless sympathy for Benedict; most of the readers at one hospital, however, were decidedly antagonistic.
About Benedict’s character, though, we never really disagreed: brilliant, witty, driven, and thoroughly unlikable. It’s been three years since we read Mendel’s Dwarf, but Benedict keeps coming back to us. He’s almost a presence in a corner of the large conference room, essentially malevolent, but reminding us of. . .what, exactly? Perhaps of no more than the infinite complexity of human beings and our equally infinite ways of responding to them.
This is a book that, once read, never leaves you. It actually shares a great deal with Mendel’s Dwarf, in that the main character, David Lurie, a white South African, is pretty much a reprobate. Honesty may be his most redeeming quality; in fact, it may be just about his only one.
Having lost his university teaching position because of an affair with a student, he goes to life with his daughter on a farm in the South African countryside. While he is there, the house is broken into, he’s beaten, and his daughter is raped by several young black men.
So here again we have a protagonist who is awfully difficult to like or admire; the moral questions in the book are so nuanced, so layered and complex, that the black-white dichotomy of South Africa is the only clearly delineated issue. At the end, though, there’s. . .the end. For those of you who haven’t read Disgrace, I won’t give it away. But readers react quite strongly to it, some feeling that David’s Disgrace is continual and unredeemed, others that the final image we have of him is actually Christ-like.
You can imagine, then, the directions this discussion will move in. Forced to articulate our reactions to David, our conclusions about the ending, and our deepest-held convictions about love and compassion, we came away with the memory of a book that had profoundly affected us.
David Lurie is now another presence in that conference room corner, every once in a while waving his hand and telling us not to forget him. As if we could.
Well, Humbert Humbert, another of our male protagonists who are damned scoundrels. Or worse.
And Humbert, many would say, is the worst of the lot. I’ve had readers bring the book in a plain brown paper wrapper; many have felt that Humbert’s obsessive love of Lolita is not a fit topic to be fictionalized—and, when asked, couldn’t come up with another topic so prohibited.
So everyone knows the story, right? So why force readers to spend time in the company of this disgusting pervert?
Well, a couple of reasons. For one thing, you’re never faced with silence when the discussion begins, and that’s not a small virtue—as every facilitator knows. Also, of course, there’s the prose, gorgeous and literate. There’s the whole subject of passion and obsession, two of the great mysteries that make up our humanity.
Eventually, all readers are forced to deal with Humbert’s confession. Is it honest? Does he really know the nature and weight of his wickedness? Can we not find just a little of Humbert in our own wicked obsessions?
With all of these questions being raised by Nabokov himself, why bother using Appel’s annotated edition? I think because it’s a brilliant work of scholarship in its own right, and also because it opens up the novel in a way unparalleled in my experience. Any reader who takes the time to read Appel’s notes will never be able to dismiss the novel as just a book about a dirty old man. And if one of our goals is to expand awareness and perception, Appel’s the man to do it.
So now we have a triumvirate in the corner: Benedict Lambert, David Lurie, Humbert Humbert. I think they talk a lot to each other; weak mortals all, perhaps they find compassion and forgiveness in like company. I suspect they have found a measure of the same in our group—and occasionally they speak aloud to us, just as a reminder.
Must Reads is an opportunity for Literature & Medicine facilitators to review good texts for Literature & Medicine seminars. A fixture of every Synapse issue, Must Reads will have a rotating authorship. We invite any Literature & Medicine facilitator to submit a review of a reading that may have gone unnoticed by other groups.