The Children's Hospital (Hardcover)

~ Chris Adrian (Author)
Key Phrases: preserving angel, stony feeling, tamale lady, Pickie Beecher, Father Jane, John Grampus (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.
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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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 615 pages
• Publisher: McSweeney's (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932416609
• ISBN-13: 978-1932416602
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #504,988 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Stable But Not Vital, January 16, 2007

By	Brett Benner (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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Yes there's no contesting Chris Adrian is a skillfull and talented writer, and through the first hundred pages or so I was completely enthralled. Yet by the end, the lesson learned was on reserving judgement on a book until you finish it. The plot is ambitious and fantastic: A modern reworking of the Noah's Ark story with the survivors of a world wide flood contained in a floating hospital. (truly.)
The story is broken into three 'events' that propel the narrative forward,(the first being the flood) and to give the other two away would be to deny a reader the fun for having the sheer vivacity to push through to the end. For me it became hard going. The fact I had no idea where the book was headed which was great, but the energy it took to plod through protracted passages that go on for pages was enough to almost make me put the book away, except for the fact I wanted to see how it turned out.
At the end of the day, when I finish a book, I have to ask myself who could I recommend this to? Sadly the answer to this was no one. If the plot doesn't derail some people, the exhaustive text will. I'm giving the impression I didn't like it, and that's not entirely the case. I just found myself working extremely hard for something that didn't pay off the way I hoped or imagined.

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars sin, sex, death, and the story of the end of the world, October 11, 2006

By	Jesse C. Severe (Columbia, TN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"The Children's Hospital" opens with the end of the world and builds in directions both pedestrian and transcendental from there. Part tale of and by an unlikely hero of a medical student, part mythic narrative as thought by the recording angel responsible for watching and chronicling events that represent a third covenant of God with the world, Adrian jumps back and forth between his ghosts deftly. It turns out that our world ends under seven sudden miles of water, the survivors those caught on a random night in a very unusual children's hospital. The remarkable order to their situation slowly starts to reveal. The recording angel doesn't try to hide this from you, but foreshadows much of the order that defines the rest of the book fairly quickly. And by the way, Stephen King should eat his pen in envy of Adrian's ability to deliver a thought worthy payoff to a book hundreds of pages after the actual apocalypse wraps up.

Per his interviews, Adrian is a student at 'divinity school' and a fan of 'American religious history.' Christian readers might mind the absence of Jesus, except as a curse word. The one oblique New Testament reference is to Satan, though I still can't figure out if he was in the book. The pattern of the 'Thing' seems like the sort of thing the Old Testament God was always pulling, and that is at least satisfying.

Though this book can't be read as future history, Adrian speaks to our times well. Death is Adrian's other purported obsession, and I believe I think of death a little bit differently now, especially after the stirring last few pages. A hospital is a place that rages against death to the very end. Perhaps it is appropriate that the apparent last moment of sin and death in human history would occur in one. The implications of the end of Adrian's world make his God's divergence from the new covenant seem somehow not so much a big deal, in fact, though I still do not know that I like why his God opens the floodgates.

So why not? Why wouldn't God pick the most hopeless place, filled with the most innocent suffering to turn history again? A children's hospital is filled with sufferers of unnamed, chronic, miserable, even incurable disorders. Another author might pick such a place to discredit a loving, omnipotent creator. Adrian, having spent many nights in such a place himself, tells his story of a terrible and wonderful miracle and the possibility of all loose ends tied.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars now finished and don't know what just hit me, February 24, 2007

By	Chester Shoeshine - See all my reviews

Oh, my God, the frustration. I couldn't put this book down. Even when the flashbacks dragged on. Even when I couldn't keep track of what was a dream and what was actual action. This book consumed me for three days. There were so many questions - What's the significance of the King's Daughter? What was Calvin's "sacrifice" if the preserving angel didn't have to be mortal first too? What happened to the book that Calvin wrote that Jemma threw into the ocean? - all left unanswered, and not in the way that leaves you feeling like the author has skillfully crafted ambiguity for interpretation, but in the way that makes you think the author has taken on so much that he can't help but forget about the questions raised earlier.

Like I said, I couldn't put it down, which speaks for the book's spell-like grip it had on me. But as beautiful as it was, I'm unbelievably furious at this book for leaving me with nothing but a pervasive sense of grief and a headache.