A routine thriller in surgical gear.
The overly long tale of a young doctor who gets caught up with the wrong woman in an ER, and of his subsequent efforts to redeem himself.
Newcomer Farris, a pediatric anesthesiologist, draws on descriptions of actual case histories to orbit the story of Dr. Malcolm Ishmail, now back practicing medicine in Nebraska for the ungodly rate of $43/hour thanks to a kid in Arizona who coded blue on him in the worst way, and just kept getting bluer and bluer. Flashback to the “The Book of Mimi,” the story of how Ishmail got there. It all begins with Mimi, Ishmail’s supervising surgeon when he’s a lowly post-grad. Mimi is Dr. Fatale, untalented but gorgeous, and eager to get into Ishmail’s jockstrap once she knows he’s a sensitive soul. She takes him on “an extended tour of the Land of the Erotic.” And while adventuresome sex is a good thing for its vulnerability, adventuresome surgery is not—which is what happens when an aneurysm goes sour on Mimi, leading to an “unfortunate outcome,” and Ishmail, who was participating, gets the third degree from folks looking into the case. Eventually, Mimi admits to Ishmail that sometimes she gets lost in the brain. Mimi’s skill had always been an issue, but will Ishmail snitch on her in the name of ethics, and because he’s really destined for a more wholesome other? Sure he will. And when Mimi hears of it, the affair’s over and she pulls off the kid gloves with a letter accusing him of inappropriate advances and involvement with illegal drugs. Once that’s over, we start up with the narrative that will lead to the bad blue-coding: Might it turn out that it was somehow Mimi’s doing, and that this might all end with gunplay? Don’t rule it out. Or might Ishmail one day find a way to make a more reasonable living as a doctor? Farris announces early that he hopes to give a more accurate account of an emergency room than E.R., but, really, Lie Stillis just a variation on its theme, accurate or no.
A routine thriller in surgical gear.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050554-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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