The Children's Hospital and a Deer Head

Last night I attended a reading by Chris Adrian and Heidi Julavits at St. Anthony's Hall on Yale campus. Adrian read from his most recent novel, The Children's Hospital and Jalavits from The Uses of Enchantment.

I'm still awed by how many of Yale's buildings look unnecessarily opulent and Gothic but it does certainly add to the mood. This time around, the reading took place amongst warm mahogany furniture, prints of American's battling redcoats on the walls, and of course, a large stag head mounted at the back of the room. I felt like donning a red, Hugh Hefner-esque robe, and smoking a cigar with a snifter of brandy.

Both readers were great, but since I couldn't shell out too much cash to buy a book, I ended up picking up a copy of Adrian's novel, and am looking forward to reading it during the Christmas holiday. The Children's Hospital is a huge book, at 615 pages, but there is something incredibly satisfying about the prospect of getting immersed in a large, sweeping novel.

I recently finished a number of whoppers, including Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's Children. All great. Well, I still have some issues with Wolfe's novel but it was still an interesting and infuriating read.

The premise of Adrian's novel is, shall we say, unique: "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."

While the idea behind the novel is unusual, Chris Adrian's background also differs from the norm. I had a chance to speak with him and learnt that he attended the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop, is now a doctor (he recently completed a pediatric residency at the University of California San Fransisco) and is currently a student at Harvard Divinity School. All he needs now is to become a carpenter...

What amazes me is that Adrian wrote The Children's Hospital while he was in residency as a medical student. How did he find the time to write? I mean, W. Somerset Maugham did write Of Human Bondage but only after he was a med student. Which makes Adrian's accomplishment that much more impressive.

Read about Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital.

Also, here's a great article by Heidi Julavits from The Believer (Julavits is a founding editor of the McSweeney's backed mag) and it is entitled: Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!

Note: Julavits' article discusses topics as diverse as Tripe, George Orwell, The Badly Made Well Made Story, Hysterical Realism, Omelets, Fleas Weighers, Born Again Christians, Casual Master-Slave Metaphors, Anti-Intellectualism, Bunny Wilson, and Ambition.