I think this is the first time, and by that I mean the first time ever, that I have read an award-winning book while it was still the most recent book to have won that award. In this case the award is of course The Scotiabank Giller Prize, a.k.a. The Friends of Margaret Atwood award (I’m really going to have to look into whether I coined that, or whether I picked it up from somewhere—a quick search on Google tells me that I probably coined it. Hooray for me!). I had mixed feelings about the idea of reading this book. Partly I was afraid it would be cold and full of shop-talk, afraid that Lam, an emergency room doctor “in real life”, wouldn’t be able to escape his own subject matter and delve into human consequences beyond the physical. But of course a big part of me wanted to see how an emergency room doctor who had never written before could come out of nowhere and win a rather substantial literary award. I suppose before we get to my opinion on the giving out of literary awards, it would be useful for me to say something about this book in particular.
The opening story, “How to Get into Medical School, Part I”, exemplifies for me what is both satisfying and unsatisfying about this book. The satisfying bits are fairly obvious; the characters are people, and though they occasionally fall into stock roles they are believable as people you might meet out in the world. Their problems and attitudes are nuanced, and though issues of medicine factory pretty heavily (it’s really the major thematic element that binds the book together, so I’m not going to complain about that), there is a lot of other stuff going on, and you can see major patterns emerging in the lives of two of the book’s four major characters. The problem is that Lam’s voice is flat, and if you’ll forgive the pun, more than a little clinical (this works to his advantage in other stories, but it’s too distancing for this story, which is far more about emotions and relationships than about medicine). He will often choose some wonderful and astonishing metaphor, the kind that the writer in me wishes I had thought of first (like “the meniscus of anger”), only later in the same sentence turning the metaphor into a simile in order to explain it (from the same example, “that grew like water perched higher than the rim of a glass”), and ruining the artistry of it. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book he thanks Margaret Atwood and others for helping him “begin to learn the art of writing”, and though he definitely shows promise, “begin” is the correct word. This is obviously a first book, and though a strong one, it didn’t deserve the Giller.
Of the four major characters that show up in these stories (Ming, Fitzgerald, Chen, and Sri), I like Fitzgerald the best, although by the end of the book he is the least likable, and far and away the least honourable. Sri is a kind soul, but timid and introverted, and sticks in the mind as a kind of delicate afterthought rather than a major player (I was glad, though, for his appearances in “Winston”—why writers, doctors included, apparently, insist on writing all insanity as though it were mania, is beyond me). Chen is bland but dedicated, not only to his job, but his family and his life. It’s difficult to imagine him losing his temper in a way that is not in some way humorous or good-natured, as in the day-in-the-life piece that closes the collection, “Before Light”. Fitzgerald and Ming stand out for me, not only because they were the first to be introduced, but because their relationship and its sometimes disturbing turns is the most fully fleshed out. Ming is certainly not pitiable, where Fitzgerald often is, but it’s her I feel sorry for and dislike, while it’s Fitzgerald I like but feel very little sympathy for (this lack of sympathy comes, I think, from seeing in him a more extreme version of myself, a kind of there but for the grace of God version of my life). Ming and Fitzgerald have a brief and intense relationship while trying to get accepted to medical school, and it both starts and ends with Ming rejecting Fitzgerald. It’s as though she is never entirely clear about her feelings, or never entirely willing to act on them when they are clear, and feels that it’s quite right that it is Fitzgerald and not herself who should pay the price for that. Though it in no way absolves him of ultimate responsibility, it is her toying with him, and ultimately her betrayal, that triggers his alcoholism and his obsessive behaviour (I know that many readers will disagree with me, but personal experience has taught me that many of the manipulative things people do to protect themselves from the temporary instability of a hurt former lover are the very things that can push that instability to its limits and exacerbate it into something more long-term). As such Fitzgerald does many deplorable things, and though I can’t forgive him, I also can’t hate him. But Ming’s betrayal, no matter how well she behaves later and no matter how much she has to endure from Fitzgerald’s inability to cope, prevents me from liking her very much (she becomes, in a rather surprising move, an obstetrician, and marries Chen).
It’s always difficult to discuss a book of short fiction. There’s so much going on, running parallel and perpendicular but not quite cohering the way a novel does. That the stories are linked makes it easier, but not substantially so. This book, I think, is easier to discuss because of its greatest weakness, something that I think will improve if Lam keeps writing (it’s generally a new writer kind of weakness). There is only one voice in this book. The third person narrator, the “I” of the broken Dr. Fitzgerald and the “I” of the more or less happy Dr. Chen, all of them are the same voice. The events they emphasize are different, but the language they use and how they see themselves and the world around them doesn’t differ significantly, at least not in terms of how the narratives are structured. Though the politics of our time, the obsession with non-fiction bleeding over into what we expect of our fiction, is probably what resulted in Lam’s Giller Prize victory, I wouldn’t discount this book entirely, and I look forward to his next.
Next: Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
