Book Review: The Children's Hospital

The Children's Hospital begins with driving rain and with a mediocre medical student named Jemma Claflin attending the birth of a baby so hideously deformed that she is “her very own syndrome.” The rain, as it turns out, is no accident – it is a planned apocalypse, the beginning of a flood that will drown everything but Jemma's hospital, left floating above miles of water, carrying humanity’s last remnants.

What follows is a tremendously creative allegorical tale of loss, guilt, and love, a story combining the imaginativeness of magical realism with the medical particulars of Grey's Anatomy. While the narrative sometimes struggles under the weight of its own symbolism, the author, Chris Adrian, a former medical student and divinity student, has written a book that is both unique and completely readable.

The story is told by one of a quartet of angels that hover in and about the hospital, one of which is Jemma's own dead brother:

“It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and to save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.”

The novel has a huge cast, including the four angels; hundreds of uniquely sick children with names such as Pickie, Kidney, and Cotton; dozens of idiosyncratic doctors and nurses; parents of the sick; a chaplain; and a tamale vendor – but the narrative never strays far from Jemma. Her struggle to cope with her pregnancy by Rob, her lover and fellow student, and her grief over her brother's death years earlier often carries more narrative weight than the loss of the entire rest of the world.

It's a long read – over 600 pages – but the novel maintains its momentum through constant tension and surprise. In the first half, the doctors and residents doggedly maintain their routine of teaching rounds, trying to distract themselves from what they've lost. As for the second half – well, the second half is different, and the less given away the better. The Children's Hospital is not a perfect novel, but it is an amazing one, a book filled with death and disease but still managing to be beautiful.

The Children's Hospital
by Chris Adrian
Format: 615 pp., hardback
Publisher: McSweeney's Books