Why I sort of can't talk about The Children's Hospital (but then sort of do anyway)

I. Let's not talk about it

I would like to talk at length about The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian, but I don't think I can go into depth about the book without talking about myself and my own religious beliefs more openly than I think I'm comfortable with. Though I do know this blog draws what can be called (in a by-the-metrics manner that, if I had a marketing department, would have said department plastering this information on press releases and posters, as if it means something more than it really does) an international audience (an audience I'm really excited about having, by the way, let's be clear on this, an audience that should in no way be offended or put off by anything I say in what follows the following parenthetical) (I mean, seriously, there's like three of you in Australia I think who read this blog now and then, and I love you people for it, and should I ever take a little road trip down your way, I'm so hoping I can count on your couches as being places I can spend serious passed-out-drunk time on), I do tend on this blog to speak something like American in 2007 America, and despite a little bit of recent Congressional nameplate shuffling, I still don't get the vibe that honesty and truth and compassion and openness is something most of us are looking for from others when it comes to discussions of faith and belief. Certainly is likely I've been reminded of this each time I've been wished a happy Easter the last couple days by people who have no reason to think they know a thing about my thoughts about what, if anything, comes after death. (Of course, my brain's been working on overdrive in the seeking-out-the-personal-significance-in-everything department the last week, anyway, so maybe the pump was already primed for me to find water in the well. Maybe there was a girl involved. Maybe it's been an emotionally complex week. Maybe.)

Point is, The Children's Hospital is a book concerned with intense theological and philosophical matters, and if you're willing to let the book in, it can muck up your mental machinery. It did so for me, and now here I am, talking about how I can't talk about it, because I simply don't know you well enough yet. I mean, really--first you buy the boy dinner, and then you ask him to put out, am I right?

It's a neat summary of my feelings about the book that by the time I finished it, for as much as I'd enjoyed the book (and yes, my definition of "enjoyment" is fairly flexible and complicated), I was still glad I'd taken this one out of the library, just because I knew that meant I could get it the fuck out of my face and back to some place where I wouldn't have to look at it anymore. That it's still sitting on my read-in-2007 pile speaks to the fact that I don't even want to touch it long enough to take it back to the library because, fuck. I can't deal with it. It is a raw, weeping wound, one I thought had stopped bleeding a long time ago. I suppose, to use a less gristly simile, it's like getting dumped: sure, you know the experience leading up to that point was awesome and beautiful and life-affirming and was worth all the sadness and all the rage, but in the end you still hurt; you still wish everything would stop reminding you of it.

Plus it's April 7 and it's been snowing all day and the roads around town are nothing but icy death. I've had enough apocalyptic craziness for one month. I feel no need to willingly take active part in more of it. Let me instead freeze while I sleep with everybody else who never knew what hit them.


II. Things said between the moment the glass was thrown at the wall and the moment the last of the Kleenex went the way of the oceans

Yes, you should read the book.

I mean, if you've come here looking for a simple recommendation, something more basic than melodramatic pronouncements against the state of States and vague hints about the potential existence of a complex mental life of a so-called blogger, you've got one. If you think you should read it, if you've somewhere along the line become interested in this book, then you should read it. I assert that it is an excellent novel.

There's all sorts of bottom-line fascinating literary stuff going on in there, stuff you can enjoy purely for the sake of art doing its arting thing. The narrator and the narrative frame of the book are ingenious, I believe, and are employed to rather excellent effect, and probably would warrant some good long wine-soaked conversation. (Definitely, if you're buying.) There's also that inherent tension, in my mind, between this book's McSweeney's-esque clever yet clean-voiced prose and the inescapable concern with seriously deep shit that has this book placing itself well in the McS's catalog while also drawing itself toward something beyond; call it engagement with a certain small-scale literary tradition combined with a gigantic leap in a tradition-surpassing direction. It's an insular story with anti-insular intent and effect, is what I think I want to say. (None of which, I should clarify, is at all meant as a knock against other McS's books--they've had the good sense to publish Stephen Dixon, and I've liked most of what else I've read that they've put out, and I certainly didn't put Paul La Farge on the 2006 Underrated Writers list because I didn't find The Facts of Winter amazing.)

I found the story itself engrossing and captivating. More so than I'd honestly expected. Truth is going into this book I did not want to go into it. I really wanted to resist it. I simply did not want to deal with a 600 page hipster doorstop, but then it turned out I didn't know what the hell else I really wanted to deal with, and so I picked it up and started reading it and, well, nothing else seemed worth putting this one down for. I read it in fits and starts, short chunks and quick gasps broken up across nearly three weeks. And yet I was hooked. The book pulled me forward and through some unmarked point of no return, some point when I knew I had to finish it, however long it was going to take. This is good storytelling, plain and simple.

But then, had that point of no return happened far later in the book, things might be different. Thing is there was a point--I'll say it was around two-thirds of the way through the book--when I got the very clear and sudden sense that, by the time I reached the end, the book was going to break my heart. I knew that in a physical sense I did have a choice; I could have put the book down, I could have walked away from it, and all this crazy emo stuff I'm spilling out onto the Internet would not have been necessary. But no; in a mental sense, I had to see what lay around the bend.

The results, as you may have guessed, were potent.