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The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

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ISBN13: 9781932416602
ISBN10: 1932416609
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: None
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Powells.com Staff Pick

This book will make you think, laugh, cry. It is without question, the best book I've read in several years. The author, a doctor and theologian, gives delicate care toward his characters as I assume he would toward his patients. You won't put this down.
Recommended by John B., Powells.com (See all of our Staff Top 5s of 2006)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A hospital is preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water. Inside, assailed by mysterious forces, doctors and patients are left to remember the world they've lost and to imagine one to come. At the center, a young medical student finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny. Simultaneously epic and intimate, wildly imaginative and unexpectedly relevant, The Children's Hospital is a work of stunning scope, mesmerizing detail, and wrenching emotion.

Review:

"Medicine, magic, the biblical story of Noah and sociological ruminations about Americans in the throes of the apocalypse come together in physician Adrian's hip, wry and ambitious debut. When the world is submerged beneath seven miles of water, only those aboard the Children's Hospital, a working medical facility and ark built by architect turned prophet John Grampus (who was ordered by God 'to save the kids') survive. Four chatty, digressive and at times grimly comic angels (the recorder, the preserver, the accuser and the destroyer) narrate this epic tale, which follows heart-sick medical student Jemma and the hospital's other unlikely inhabitants (such as the overly-cutely-named Dr. Snood and Ethel Puffer) as they attempt to ensure humanity's survival and live by virtue of the ship's 'replicators,' heaven-sent devices that can make 'apples out of old shoes; shoes out of shit.' Eventually, Jemma discovers her magical ability to heal the sick. As fragments of her tragic past come to light, so do clues about humanity's future, and, after 200 days at sea, what part Jemma will finally play in it. This dense and lengthy satirical-but-sincere novel may challenge readers' patience with its fairy-tale-like characters and its long-windedness, but Adrian's knack for surprise and his ability to find meaning in seemingly ridiculous situations is rewarding." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"Many novelists set themselves the task of confronting the world's ills in their fiction. Fewer attempt to actually cure them, as Chris Adrian does in his second novel, 'The Children's Hospital,' a sprawling and impassioned morality tale in which a catastrophe of biblical scale wipes out nearly all life, human and otherwise, on Earth. Adrian has an impressive CV for a young writer: The author of a... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) critically acclaimed debut novel, 'Gob's Grief,' and short fiction that has appeared in The New Yorker and Paris Review, he's also a pediatrician now studying at Harvard Divinity School. All of these experiences bear fruit in 'The Children's Hospital,' though that fruit may be a specialized taste, more durian or rambutan than apple or plum.

After a brief prologue spoken by an angel, we're thrust into the middle of a children's delivery room where Jemma Claflin, a third-year medical student, assists at yet another difficult birth. Outside, 'lightning arched overhead and showed her a vast parking lot, empty except for a few dozen dead cars stranded in water up to their headlights.' Inside, Jemma hurries from the birth of a 'gruesome baby ... so unique that she was her very own syndrome.' Jemma is in a rush to meet her lover, Rob, another med student; they have wild sex in a locked room. Timing is everything, even — especially — at the end of the world: Moments after they make love, the hospital is rocked from its foundations and a voice announces:

'Creatures, I am the preserving angel. Fear not, I will keep you. Fear not, I will protect you. Fear not, you will bide with me. Fear not, I will carry you into the new world.'

Miles of water have flooded the Earth. Nothing appears to have survived this cataclysm — no plants, no mammals, not even any fish. Only the children's hospital floats across this eerie marine wasteland, its patients and residents and support staff miraculously preserved by a small but hardworking supernatural cohort ('it takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse').

The first half of this novel is superb. Adrian's account of the medical staff's day-to-day battles — with disease, with each other, with the demanding parents of their young patients — is gripping and intensely humane, despite the frank and often horrific descriptions of the disorders that brought these children to the hospital in the first place. The exhausted workers stumble zombie-like through their rounds and tend to the sickest children whenever they hear 'the soft tinkling bell of the code bell, and the angel's calm alarum: "A child is dying."'

The irony, of course, is that their jobs aren't much different from the way they were before the flood (which everyone calls 'the Thing'). The mediating angels helpfully provide replicators that produce any food or comfort item the humans desire. But not even angels, it seems, can cure cancer or insert an IV into a wizened neonate's arm.

The stressed-out, winsomely pragmatic Jemma is at the center of the novel's huge cast of characters, mortal and semi-divine. She's death-haunted: Her beloved brother was a suicide and is now himself an angelic figure; their father died of lung cancer; their mother self-immolates in a house fire; Jemma's first love expires in a car crash. Is Rob doomed, too? Is everything bad really her fault? A lot of women feel this way but, given the circumstances, it's hard to argue with her.

Jemma isn't just the book's palpitating, telltale heart. She's also its gravid, symbol-laden vessel. Pregnant with Rob's child — someone's child, anyway, or Something's — she develops miraculous powers of healing. These eventually explode in an extraordinary extended sequence, a literary tour-de-force in which Jemma weaves together broken synapses, inflates collapsed lungs and burns away all the diseases and disorders of the sick children — the harrowing of the hospital, or Thing Two, as it's quickly named.

But Adrian's carefully calibrated balance between the miraculous and the mundane begins to wobble in his depiction of the post-Thing Two world. The novel's baggy structure can't support the symbolic weight of all those angels and miracle children, who take center stage as the hospital's mortal, adult staff begins to sicken. There are haunting set pieces in the latter pages, but Adrian kills off much of the tension along with his flawed but riveting medical personnel.

Still, despite its weaknesses, 'The Children's Hospital' establishes Chris Adrian as a remarkable American fabulist in the tradition of Melvin Jules Bukiet and Tony Kushner, writers who define and confront the terrifying moral choices of a new century. In what may be a terminally sick world, it's good to have a doctor in the house.

Elizabeth Hand's collection 'Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories' has just been published." Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Review:

"Adrian is master of detail. Trusting our ability to recognize type, he plucks characters from their type and adds enough specifics to bring us face to face with an individual." Boston Globe

Review:

"[A] wildly imaginative tale of loss and redemption, its writing as varied and textured as the story it brings to life." Karla Starr, The Willamette Week

Review:

"To read Chris Adrian is to take part in the exciting process of watching a talented and original writer gain mastery of his powerful gifts." Myla Goldberg, The New York Times Book Review

Review:

"[Adrian's] newest attempt fails to impress....[T]he premise is wonderfully imaginative....[H]e spends too much time trying to wow us with medical jargon, which slows the pace. Sadly, not recommended." Library Journal

Synopsis:

About the Author

Chris Adrian is the author of a previous novel, Gob's Grief, and his short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories. He recently completed a pediatric residency at the University of California San Francisco, and is currently a student at Harvard Divinity School.

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: mcmahonle, January 25, 2008 (view all comments by mcmahonle)
This book is fantastic in every sense. Its early description of the fatigue and bewilderment of student doctors is something that everyone who has gone to medical school can relate to. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this gifted writer's newest book.
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: Greg Murphy, June 16, 2007 (view all comments by Greg Murphy)
Epic and challenging (but not "difficult"), and occasionally frustrating only because even at over 600 pages, there are times you'll want more. Also you'll learn a lot about strange diseases!
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: claire.r.foster, February 24, 2007 (view all comments by claire.r.foster)
"The Children's Hospital" is truly of Biblical proportions, but doesn't quite live up to its own legend. Adrian's characters are finely crafted, and his scenes are heartbreakingly true -- but, in the face of the plot, which overwhelms every aspect of the novel, their delicacy collapses. Adrian monopolizes the reader's attention for chapters without addressing the obvious, and ambitious themes of divine redemption, the Apocalypse, and the meaning of love. As a result, the end comes rushing up too soon, but thankfully doesn't leave a bad taste in the reader's mouth. This is a good story, with all the earmarks of a future classic.
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9781932416602
Author:: Adrian, Chris
Publisher:: McSweeney's Books
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Science Fiction - General
Subject:: Hospitals
Subject:: Floods
Publication Date:: August 28, 2006
Binding:: Hardcover
Language:: English
Pages:: 615
Dimensions:: 9.28x6.26x1.98 in. 2.11 lbs.

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