KROOKED KETAMINE

In Williams’ novel, a disgruntled government doctor undergoes surgery, and the powerful anesthetic seems to transport him through history.

Ben Anderson is a physician who runs the surgical department at a Veterans Administration Hospital in Cincinnati, and it’s an increasingly thankless job. At the age of 58, he’s tired of navigating the hospital’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, and his pugnacious boss, Barbara “Barb” Dwyer, terrorizes him and wants to force him out of his position. To make matters worse, he’s afflicted with a “janky heart,” as he describes it, and needs a pacemaker; he fears that his condition will be the justification that Dwyer needs to put him out to pasture. During the procedure, he’s anesthetized with ketamine and drifts deeply into a historical dream set in 1863, in which he’s the personal physician to the notoriously racist Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Ben, who’s white, not only saves Forrest’s life but also declines to take extreme measures to save the life of a Black soldier, leading him to wonder if it’s possible that he’s an “unfixable racist.” In this lively novel by Williams, Anderson will experience more than one “ketamine-soaked dream”: In another, he finds himself on the HMS Beagle in 1832, conveying Charles Darwin. The author’s style is sharply surreal and provocatively raises questions about what reality is—or, more precisely, what exists outside the bubble of his anesthetic stupor. As wild as the novel is, though, there are serious threads that run through it as the protagonist experiences a “reckoning on life, death and a compromise with my subconscious.” Delightfully, however, these themes are handled with wit and never become ponderous or didactic.

A clever and deeply intelligent exploration of one man’s turbulent reality.