Along with all of this other weird stuff that’s been happening to me over the past 6 or so months—losing weight being the most obvious and least significant—I stopped reading. That’s not exactly correct; I stopped reading novels. I still read the web obsessively (although I haven’t read most of my writing/agent blogs in a million years, and since the election I’ve cut way back on the political ones too), but of the last 20 times Darin and I went into a Borders or Barnes and Noble, I walked out empty-handed 19 times. I picked up books and said, I’ve read this already. Or, What’s interesting here? Nothing interested me.
I did keep hearing about this book Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell, though. I can’t remember why or where. But I kept running across references to this book here and there, and I thought, Well, I’ll get it from the library.
Holy God, I wish I’d bought it; this book was that entertaining.
Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan Catholic, the worst hospital in New York. He is also a former hitman for the Mob, currently in the witness protection program. This works because he spends all of his time at the hospital, and no one with any options (like mob guys) would go near ManCat on a dare, so he never runs into his former associates. Until, of course, he does.
This book is hilarious, violent, vulgar, moving, and one of the most fabulous reads I’ve run across in a long time. Peter Brown is actually a doctor, despite his past, and despite the snark and exhaustion you can see he’s actually getting something out of his new chosen profession. He also explains in detail what he got out of his last job too—how he got into it, why he got out of it. It’s filled with footnotes of information about medical processes and random asides that are interesting and hilarious unto their own right and all of which are…let’s just say, read the damn footnotes, okay? Details you think are just random bits of color keep coming back in strange and unexpected ways.
The book opens with Brown getting mugged on his way to work. It doesn’t stop until the last page. Along the way, you get interchanges like this:
I sit back down. Wipe my nose with my left hand to cover the slow movement of my right hand toward my beeper. “Guy’s got some right buttock and subclavicular pain OUO despite PCA*,” I say. “Looks like a fever, too.”
* Like you care what this means.
This novel also has one of the more, uh, memorable climaxes I’ve ever run across. In fact, I had to skim that part because it was so graphic and deeply disturbing. What’s more disturbing: that’s not even the violent part. The violent part of the climax gets skimmed over in the text, because it’s completely beside the point by the time it actually happens.
Seriously. This book is a total ride.