Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #335526 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 615 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
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 critically acclaimed debut novel, Gob's Grief, and short fiction that has appeared in the New Yorker and the 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 hard-working 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, tell-tale 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.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In Adrian's second novel, an elegant and enormously wondrous monstrosity, the world comes to an end, drowned beneath seven miles of water. All that is preserved is a solitary children's hospital and its occupants. Presiding over the apocalypse are four angels who often are indistinguishable from demons: one to chronicle and one to accuse, one to protect and one to punish. Within the floating hospital, medical student Jemma Claflin discovers that a fearsome healing fire burns within her, a fire that she uses to cleanse the hideously diseased children of their "wrongness." It is useless, however, against the greater wrongness of the rest of her ark mates, who struggle to maintain some semblance of normalcy amidst the confounding swirl of the end-time. Adrian, poetically and with exacting precision, has crafted a prophetic, difficult novel of compassion and healing, but with a keen eye fixed on the damning reach of divine wrath. The scalpel's edge between grace and violence, between healing and putrefaction, can scarcely distinguish life as an obscene abomination from the miracle it suffers to be. Adrian attempts a near-impossible summit, and delivers a devastating, transformative work that is certain to burn in the minds of readers long after the final page's end of the end of the world. Ian Chipman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Disturbing rapture imagery
The premise of the book is certainly interesting, following the rapture story and the final existence of man. Unfortunately I found a lot of the imagery to be very disturbing and hard for me to want to read.

Many of the characters were memorable, and I do find myself thinking back to this book and times and considering the final state of humanity. Unfortunately that is often balanced with some horrible acts by the characters and many flashbacks to the main characters home life which are both boring and disturbing in how she was raised.

I'm sure the imagery is used as an example regarding just how far humanity has fallen to allow the rapture to come. It's also disturbing that while the images are hard to read, they are also very plausible today, evoking a sense that things don't have to get much worse for the rapture to come.

While I can't say that I liked reading the book, the final outcome is interesting and the premise is memorable.

imaginative and compelling
I really liked this book! It was so intreaging, and really captures big imaginations like mine. I had dreams that definately were rooted in me reading before bedtime. I am not religious, but found the religious themes interesting, especially with todays society leaning so much towards secular views. The end was sortof sad, but very appropriate. I couldnt imagine it ending any other way. (It was sortof trippy) You will need some time to reflect after reading it. I could see how some people might not like it, but if you have a gigantic imagination and loved incredible stories, read this book.

Whose Hospital is it anyway?
I'm finally getting around reading this book for the second time, after thinking about it for over a year (this book won't let you off the hook once it gets into your head).

This time around, I think I'll keep the book's title in mind. The frustration from the characters within the book as well as from readers of it seems to be related to us all thinking that the hospital is there for the medical staff rather than the patients. Once you can accept that is not the case, the book has an incredibly happy ending...

I believe that partially, this book is about us, our medical system, and our society. But eventually, this book deals, like all truly great books, with you and me alone.

Don't pick at that bit of dry skin...