cover image The White Life

The White Life

Michael Stein. Permanent Press (NY), $22 (172pp) ISBN 978-1-57962-022-6

Physician Stein has written a little jewel of a second novel (after the praised Probabilities), an unsentimental, assured, informative look at what doctors do. Like the author, narrator Dr. Peter Cave works in a New England teaching hospital, which, like all hospitals, is ""white,"" that is, antiseptic and cold. The understated, beautifully controlled story follows the treatment of a difficult but interesting patient. Retired bachelor George Dittus, who has checked into the hospital complaining of chest pains, reminds Cave of his father, who died of a heart attack when Cave was 13. Cave believed then, and believes now, that his father's physician, one Dr. Gresser, was his father's ""killer,"" in the sense that ""not enough was done."" Like Cave's father, Dittus won't take advice; he wants to go home. Dittus's conflicts with the hospital bureaucracy give readers a fully developed sense of the material contexts of medicine: we learn not just what doctors do, but who does what, and where they do it, and how and why. After Cave nearly kills Dittus by accidentally administering the wrong drug dose, he decides he must confront his father's doctor and settle accounts. Yet his meeting with Gresser is oddly unsatisfying; as a physician himself, he understands Gresser's explanations for omissions in his father's treatment, yet emotionally he feels they are empty rationalizations. Meanwhile, Dittus is refusing to take his medication, and a social worker feels he must go to a nursing home. Stein interpolates insightful mini-essays into the narrative, explaining the process of ""taking a history,"" for instance, and musing on the relationship of surgeons to other doctors. There is a candid assessment of the sexual tension between doctors and the patients they examine. Even as he suggests moral and ethical questions, Stein sustains the psychological tension. His narrative succeeds both as a tale of sons and fathers, and as an uncommonly knowledgeable and eloquent look at the complex emotions involved in practicing medicine. (July) FYI: Stein is a son-in-law of the authors Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan.