Review
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Title: Physician, Heal Thyself: A Compact Collection of Contemporary Stories
Author: Chris McClelland
Narrated by: Jonathan Ruth
Length: 56 minutes
Unabridged audiobook
Release date: 03-28-24
Language: English
Publisher: Mr. Chris McClelland
Price: Audio: 3.46; Paper: 4.00; e-Book .99
Reviewed for the Association of Mormon Letters by Harlow Clark
Here’s a bit of synchronicity or irony. I finished listening to Walter Wangerin Jr.’s last book (still being edited at his death), Storycraft: The Art of Spiritual Narrative, and then started Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. Because Physician, Heal Thyself is in my Audible library, Audible won’t tell me the cost, so I clicked the publisher link to see if I could find it another way and was greeted by a photo of World War I trench warfare, cover photo for Chris McClelland’s Under Old Glory: A Novella of War, Love, and Faith.
I say a bit of irony because Fussell’s first chapter is about trench warfare, and irony is his catchword for the chapter. And Chris McClelland’s compact collection of compact stories, Physician, Heal Thyself, is also full of irony, starting with the idea of the wounded or sickened healer and continuing in the narrator’s opening paragraph for the title story:
“Two kinds of people are attracted to working in the medical field, angels of mercy, people dedicated to alleviating suffering and promoting health, and those who listen to their demons and take pleasure in inflicting a great amount of distress, pain, grief, and death. I know this because my wife is an ER physician at the local hospital and told me this, assuring me that she is one of the angels.”
I remember Leslie Norris’s instruction that the opening sentence should contain the whole story in some way, and this one does, though the way it contains the story is deeply ambiguous, not because it lacks a confrontation between angel and demon, but because of the setting for that confrontation.
The story takes place during a pandemic, and the wife wonders why hospital administrators insist on isolating patients from their families when very few are getting very sick.
That’s almost all we know about the pandemic until we hear about a mask mandate. Storytelling, Wangerin tells us, is about details, choosing what details to highlight, and that detail raises the question of whether the pandemic is allegorical, the story an allegory for the COVID-19 pandemic.
With that detail, I want to know what I’m reading, especially when one character says that even if a few people suffocate inside their masks, that’s the price we have to pay to keep people safe.
Am I reading wry social commentary about the nature of pandemics and power and how we react to them, or propaganda from someone who doesn’t believe the COVID-19 pandemic was real?
Propaganda is a strong word, as James Thurber reminds us in his fable “The Very Proper Gander.”
I introduce the word here because my sense of whether or not something is propaganda influences how I respond to a story. Even if I agree with the propaganda, I am likely to feel violated. I don’t come to a story to have a point shoved down my throat; I come to hear a story and meet characters.
But the story doesn’t go where I would expect a propaganda piece to go by, say, appropriating the mantle of Ibsen’s great prophetic play about a public health crisis, An Enemy of the People, and have the heroine stand alone against the conspirators proclaiming the need to be strong and lonely. The last sentence or two takes the story in a completely different, though properly foreshadowed, direction.
My sense of the story’s emotional texture is less of broad satire, conspiracy, or betrayal, and more about the emotional cost to caregivers of feeling overwhelmed in a pandemic, disoriented.
Or maybe not. The blurb says, “The story reflects in great detail the anguishing personal conflicts of conscious the medical people at the time were suffering.” (I assume McClelland meant conscience, and either auto-corrupt took over, or he was dictating the blurb, and the voice transcription was misheard—both of which fascinate me as an editor.)
I listened to the collection twice, to test my reactions to it, and still think the title story’s consciousness of itself is not broad slapstick satire. Any sense of being slapped by an authorial stick goes away with the last sentence. It’s much more hopeful. The emotional texture has more in common with the imagery of life carrying on in the midst of death in The Grapes of Wrath than with heavy-handed satire. (Which some people think The Grapes of Wrath is.)
I mention The Grapes of Wrath because part of the value of art for me is how it engages my experience with other art, and my whole experience as a reader, writer, editor, husband, father, son, and friend as it asks me to react.
There’s plenty to engage with in the eight minutes of the title story, but I’ll let you struggle with the compactness of these stories yourself, and leave you with one more literary allusion about wounds and healing.
My father used to tell students that one of his great regrets about his doctoral studies at the University of Washington was not taking a class from Theodore Roethke. Someone had taken a volume of Roethke’s poetry to a psychiatrist who had diagnosed his mental illness from the poems. My father said he used that as an excuse. He didn’t even go to hear Roethke read.
In “The Shape of the Fire,” Roethke’s narrator, having passed through the fire, exclaims, “The shapes a bright container can contain.”
I could say the same thing about this compact container. In these six stories, we have satire and social commentary, horror, a naturalistic fairy tale, and meditations on agency, betrayal, and the challenges and perplexities and wins and losses of friendship, with themes interweaving among the stories.
McClelland’s approach to his subjects is unusual, maybe disorienting, but rewarding, too. There’s a lot to uncompact in these stories as you turn the handle round and round and wait to see what pops out.
Enjoy.