Updated November 12, 2024.
They appear everywhere in fiction: complex worlds created around health and well-being. A few recent exemplary novels are reviewed below. I’ve just updated this to add State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg, published in summer 2024. Small Rain by Garth Greenwell is even hotter off the presses; Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin came out a couple of years ago, but the paperback edition is new. While writing this up, a client came to me for help with a query on a grumpy main character and a bookseller suggested, as a comp, A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backmin, the basis for the recent Tom Hanks movie A Man Called Otto. Turns out that Ove’s story has a lot to say about the importance of a sense of well-being.
Links below are to Amazon and Bookshop.org.
If you have any connection with Florida at all, you will step into the world of State of Paradise with a visceral feeling of recognition: the bike man and his dog mysteriously at odds with the homeless truck man (who also has a dog); the trees full of cats; the rain that falls like a plague for days, displacing some from their homes, making other households islands unto themselves, a deluge that disappears one sunny morning, leaving the cats to loll on the empty lawns and no trace of flood.
Long Covid becomes a cultural persona here. While the narrative doesn’t nail to characters the diagnoses of POTS, ME/CFS, or other disorders on the growing lists published by public health authorities, in a narrative combining autofiction with speculative fiction, Van den Berg explores long Covid on a social-psychic level—a disintegration of American cultural identity that seems to manifest in the feeling of living in a parallel universe. The story examines the aching wish that we could go back, change one small thing, the feeling that maybe if we had, the timeline could have turned out for the better.
What I like about this book is that, while carrying all manner of baggage, wounds, and illness, of which they are not always acutely aware, the characters focus most of their energy on simply getting on with it and, hopefully, leaving no one behind. While seeming to acknowledge that healing can be elusive, they strategize fantastically on living.
Comfy weird, would be my short take, with a trigger warning on institutionalization for mental health issues. The prose is hypnotic, unsettling, creating the clouded sense of reality that I get when affected by autoimmune brain fog, but without the intellectual frailty, appropriately reflecting the underwater intellect that lurks through the story. Octopodian, maybe—can I coin that? Left me feeling that I was sensing everything with my whole body and thinking that way too, instead of having discrete sensations separated by nose, eyes, ears, brain.
A novel about a hospital stay. While the appeal might seem elusive at first, Greenwell with his poet’s eye and down-to-earth Midwestern style leads the reader lovingly down this rabbit hole. There is all the human vulnerability you would expect to find in the patient’s experience, but more intellectual gravity, and much voluptuous distraction in daydreaming about love and wholeness, as the narrator drifts in and out of a mild opioid haze.
There is also a new kind of heroism here, one in which a nurse’s management of a sponge bath amid a tangle of IV lines, a technician’s deftness with an ultrasound wand while inserting a PICC line, and a partner’s dutiful delivery of daily clean underwear take center stage, while the tension and high drama of the operating room is put off indefinitely. Having been through some recent health crises myself, I found the novel both soothing and uplifting, while mindful of how current events, from the pandemic to climate change disasters, touch us all.
This is a book about work, author Gabrielle Zevin declares simply, in the acknowledgements to this gorgeous novel. It is equally about love, she then adds. In a way, that’s all you need to say in order to grok the gist of this book. Adding it up, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about most of the things that give life beauty and purpose.
It is also a fairy tale of friendship and creative magic and, like Small Rain, incorporates opportunities to meditate on all the issues that life throws one’s way, from racism and sexism and gender bias to gun violence and chronic health issues, both mental and physical. But the best part is the games. Compared with the main characters in this novel, I’m just a game dabbler. Although I played, and still own, the original Zelda: Link to the Past along with the ancient Super NES system I first played it on, and although I was more excited about Breath of the Wild than an old woman perhaps should be, I never finished a Zelda game till Tears of the Kingdom; and I never could play the elaborate, multi-player shooters that my sons somehow mastered (although they were raised in a Waldorf home). But the games I did play, I played because I loved them, because they put me in touch with a part of myself that only comes fully alive in a well-wrought fictional world. Tomorrow sharply evoked that feeling. I was left, at the end, with that deeply wistful feeling of leaving behind a beautiful world that you wish was real.
The wonderfulness of the games invented for Tomorrow is that they emanate from love and empathy. Two characters live with ongoing health concerns, upon which I won’t elaborate. Zevin’s treatment of these issues balances the relative liability of personal suffering against the relative asset of human relationship and the pursuit of a strong purpose. There are no cures, no aha moments in which illness is conquered or disability is overcome. She portrays the struggle as part of the work.
I heard good things from a faraway friend about the movie A Man Called Otto, but I couldn’t get any of my usual movie buddies (my husband and offspring) to watch it with me. When a client came to me with a book about a grumpy main character, and a bookseller suggested Ove as a comp, I decided to read A Man Called Ove, the basis for the Otto movie.
As it turns out, Ove is sort of about grumpiness as a chronic illness—an invisible collection of frail, easily triggered, misjudged nerves that derails a person from ever having a “normal” life. Trigger warning—Ove is suicidally depressed. He has struggled all his life to compensate for his condition by employing stereotypically toxic masculine choler, but he is losing the battle. Only by trusting in new relationships and revealing his vulnerabilities can he not only survive, but live a purposeful life.
We first meet Ove as he is, inexplicably, shopping for an iPad. It becomes clear from the first sentence that he has no idea what it is or why it’s considered “good,” and we get the impression that he deeply mistrusts anything lacking tires that he can kick. We don’t discover the reason for the shopping trip until nearly the end of the book, after a story that tells the life of a grieving, severely depressed, unfriendly man, who does feel profound love, but can’t recover from the wounds left when his trust was betrayed. When his most important support disappears, he finds it impossible, on his own, to maintain a sense of purpose and well-being.
A Man Called Ove is, without question, intended as a feel-good novel. It doesn’t seek to break literary or political boundaries; and sometimes the halo with which this grumpy, disagreeable man is depicted is a bit much. Sadly, there are plenty of grumpy men who lack redemptive backstories, or whose cruelty fails to redeem even the most heart-wrenching backstory. But I did come away thinking it would be nice to try to remember that perhaps, sometimes, grumpy people are guarding big hearts in an untrustworthy world. You may have mixed feelings about Ove, but he’s worth reading and remembering.
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