The Laws of Invisible Things: A Novel [Hardcover]

Frank Huyler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 2004

In this suspenseful and finely wrought first novel, a young doctor’s encounter with a mysterious disease leads him to a crossroads between faith and reason

Not long into Michael Grant’s first year in his new practice, a young girl in his care unexpectedly dies. He might not have been able to change that outcome, but he didn’t do all in his power to prevent it, either. So when Michael is asked to take on the dead girl’s father as a patient, he feels he must oblige the family’s wishes. Examining the man, Michael notices an unusual pattern—a white, serpentine spiral—on the back of the throat and in his eye. But before a diagnosis can be made, the man is dead, the victim of a mysterious fire, and soon Michael himself is experiencing symptoms of the strange illness.

Believing that he has stumbled across a new disease but unable to convince his skeptical colleagues, Michael sets out to gather evidence. His quest takes him into a wilderness of disease, religion, and mystery, and becomes a journey that leads him to question not only his belief in the order of the world but his own place and purpose within it.

Lyrical, poetic, and utterly engrossing, The Laws of Invisible Things fully delivers on the promise of Frank Huyler’s critically acclaimed collection of medical stories, The Blood of Strangers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Chilling, subdued and scalpel sharp, this debut novel by the physician author of The Blood of Strangers (1999)—a highly acclaimed collection of starkly realistic short stories set in the world of medicine—explores the hazy borderlines of sin and disease. Just out of training, 35-year-old Michael Grant is in his seventh month of practice with an established internist in a medium-sized North Carolina city when the young granddaughter of an African-American minister dies in his care. Because he thinks he might have been less than thorough in handling the case, he agrees to honor the minister's request to examine his son—the dead girl's father—who is also ailing. The exam reveals a curious white tendril-like pattern on the back of the patient's throat and inside his eye. Regrettably, before he has enough lab work to make a diagnosis, the patient quickly worsens and dies in a house fire. When Michael begins to experience similar symptoms and almost dies, too, he is convinced he has encountered an insidious new infectious disease. Unable to convince his colleagues, the disease-ravaged Michael embarks with Nora, his senior partner's daughter, on a quest to identify the nameless scourge. Evidence leads Michael to exhume the body of the elderly minister's granddaughter, and the trail takes them to a remote mountaintop. Deftly plotted and rich with psychological and ethical nuance, this fine debut succeeds equally as medical suspense novel and understated morality play.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In his first novel, emergency physician Huyler presents Michael Grant, an internist and infectious disease specialist in private practice, who is drawn into circumstances that cause him to rethink his decision to be a doctor. He works with Ronald Gass, whose North Carolina practice he hopes to take over upon Gass' retirement. In the meantime, he is still reeling from the loss of an eight-month-old patient whose death, if not inevitable, was certainly avoidable. He receives a call from the patient's grandfather, the Reverend Thomas Williams, and after he and Williams visit the child's grave, Williams takes a liking to him and asks whether he would be kind enough to examine Williams' son, Jonas, the child's father. After two appointments, blood labs, and a biopsy, Grant can't detect anything but feels he's on the verge of discovering some previously unknown disease. Then Jonas dies in a fire. With solid characterization and crisp dialogue, Huyler has fashioned a timely parable about what it means to be a physician. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (April 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805073302
• ISBN-13: 978-0805073300
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,599,167 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "He began to feel the ache, the blinking wonder of survival", April 15, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Laws of Invisible Things: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a somber, disturbing, yet quite beautiful novel. Huyler mysteriously weaves the worlds of spirit, faith and physical suffering into a dreamscape type narrative that is at once beguiling, and at times totally horrific in its depiction of the frailties of the human body. I can't say that I enjoyed this novel, but I did appreciate Huyler's lucid and lyrical prose as he brings together the threads of what it means to be a physician in the world of individual disease and infection.

The narrative focuses on three men: two physicians Michael Grant, Ronald Gass, and one man of faith, the Reverend Williams. Michael has just joined Doctor Gass's practice when a young girl in his care inexplicably dies; Ronald tells Michael that he didn't do enough to help her. When the Reverend Williams brings to Michael the girl's Father, Jonas as a patient, Michael takes him on and soon learns that he has a strange illness, which manifests itself in tiny white spirals on the back of his throat and in his eye. After Jonas meets a fiery death in his house trailer, Michael releases he has also caught the disease when he finds one tiny white line in the back of his throat uncoiling from behind his left tonsil. As illness begins to consume him, he begins to gather evidence about the disease, and at the same time, he is enigmatically drawn into a love relationship with Nora, Ronald's daughter.

Michael, recently divorced and living in a self-imposed state of seclusion, begins to question his life, work and the world around him. He feels the "weight of profundity without its content" - the world has become fixed and hard around him. And as he gets sicker he dwells on his past, when he lived as a young man, keen-eyed, full of passion, knowledge, and full of faith in "the laws of invisible things." For Michael there is only one serpentine thread, one line at the back of his throat, so he has only one path to follow, but for Jonas there were many threads ? many paths to follow. Jonas left the faith, lost his innocence and became part of the disillusioned "underworld."

Michael is plagued by dreams of the underworld, a place where things do not make sense, a place of patterns and forces just beneath the surface of the everyday. He ruminates on people's lives and their faiths, and the unbroken laws of the universe and the cycles that keep continuing out of conscious thought and entirely out of conscious reach. And he questions the role of medicine and the act of unquestioningly peering through the world with an electron microscope examining specimens " the flesh of birds, of animals and children, the bloody entrails of mosquitoes" hoping to see clearly when all is just another "match struck in the underworld." We think of life in circular terms but instead we get an uneven line, and nothing ever circles back and becomes whole as we know it should.

Huyler's experiences as an emergency physician really show, as there are some horrific moments in this novel, particularly in one scene when one of the main protagonists suffers a devastating heart attack. The pain, and anguish is quite distressing in its authenticity. Similar to Michael Cunningham's The Hours, the Laws of Invisible Things is a powerful, resonant and almost existential meditation on life, death, suffering and the loss of faith. This is an introspective, meditative and quite powerful piece of work. Mike Leonard April 04.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Robin Cook, July 6, 2005

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Brian (California) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Laws of Invisible Things: A Novel (Hardcover)

Feels like a medical thriller, then transcends the genre, turning attention to less solveable mysteries. Dr. Grant's failure to cure his patient, and his ordeal with the same mysterious illness, leads him to question his career and his place in the world. The story deliberately pulls back, and the initial pressing concerns--the nature of the illness, the relationship to his mentor--give way to a larger and mare haunting emptiness that stays with you long after you've finished.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Impressive First Novel from a "Literary Doctor", May 15, 2004

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Laws of Invisible Things: A Novel (Hardcover)

You need not have read Frank Huyler's THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS to know that there is something lyrical in the practice of medicine, but it helps. You need only to have watched television's E.R. to understand that, amidst the technical terms and the clipped jargon, there is something about the urgent rhythms of an emergency room that approaches, well, if not poetry, then something not too far removed from it.

Huyler is a doctor, and a poet, and knows how the two disciplines intersect. His first novel is set in the medical world, but sends out long, serpentine feelers into the realm of poetry. THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS concerns Dr. Michael Grant, a recent arrival to North Carolina, trying to settle down in a new city and a new practice. But disturbing things keep happening, one right after the other, all of them interrelated by one mysterious secret.

There is, first of all, the little girl whose death we learn about in the opening pages. One moment, she is in Dr. Grant's office, sitting on her mother's knee, with a fever --- nothing that looks too serious, nothing that can't be controlled with the proper treatment and, perhaps, a lollipop. Hours later, before a diagnosis is made and before antibiotics can be administered, she is dead. There's a word for it ---meningococcemia, caused by an invisible microbe, obedient only to its own laws. But the word itself means very little in isolation and the child is dead for all time, and Dr. Grant must carry that fact with him like a heavy burden.

That burden is heavy because of a possible slip-up in diagnosis that may or may not have been fatal; nobody can know. But it is specifically heavy because of the presence of two authority figures watching over Dr. Grant. One is his employer, the reserved and scholarly Dr. Gass, who doesn't trust Grant's judgment. The other is the girl's grandfather, a local preacher, who wants to make sure that Dr. Grant wasn't at fault in her death.

The grandfather's concern leads him to make a request --- that Dr. Grant treat his son, the father of the dead child, for an unspecified ailment. Dr. Grant finds that his new patient has frequent fevers, sees bright lights and is regularly confused. Grant, too, is confused by the case, and can find no cause for the sickness or its bizarre symptoms.

This makes THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS sound like a medical mystery, with a dedicated doctor seeking out the tracks of a dreaded new disease. But the mysteries Huyler is chasing are primarily mysteries about how people behave, how they react to loss and disappointment and heartache. Dr. Grant is alone, adrift after the collapse of his marriage, largely indifferent to his craft when not completely oppressed by it. The cold, chilly Dr. Gass is trapped in an unvarying routine of professionalism and competence, unwilling or unable to seem anything less than the man in the starched white lab coat. The preacher and his son are filled with doubt and guilt about the spiritual gulf that separates them. Just as the invisible, unknown specter of "Grant's Disease" winds its threads through the bodies of its victims, the threads of loneliness and sorrow wrap themselves around the characters.

Huyler's spare, meticulous prose passes light through his characters like an X-ray, at times illuminating the dark corners of the medical jargon and at times revealing the telltale shadows consistent with broken hearts. Huyler is a talented writer, with long, lyrical descriptive passages contrasting nicely with the shorter, choppier rhythms of dialogue. But it is the skillful handling of the medical prose that makes THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS memorable and establishes Huyler's niche as a literary doctor.

As one of Huyler's characters lies ill, he has Dr. Grant explain the mechanics of his illness, putting the mysterious chemical interactions of the body into tightly written prose and giving us the medical terminology. "They have a name for everything," a non-medical character explains. No, Grant thinks to himself, "they don't; they don't have a name for everything." Human medicine and human relationships have their invisible mysteries, and Huyler does an outstanding job in teasing them out and displaying them on the printed page.

--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds