New opening for "Pathological States"

The first two chapters of "Pathological States - a novel" are now published as the ending of "A Burnt Offering - a fable" - titled "Dr. Morris Weisberg - an introduction" - here's the cover from Amazon.com:

 https://amzn.to/2ZTHaRg.

Prologue for "Pathological States - a novel"

           The best way to put yourself in a novel, an old friend once told me, is to leave yourself out. Not only have I removed myself here, but this prologue also leaves out my protagonist, spry but aging as he is, Dr. Morris Weisberg, pathologist and sometime Chief of Laboratory. Here, instead, you are to meet an antagonist, Dr. Bill Smith, who will appear later but significantly at the Montecito Veterans Hospital, located on the northern rim of Los Angeles in the desiccated hills some miles from suburban Northridge. Of course, these designations – hero or antagonist – are provisional, even questionable, and you must exercise your inalienable right as reader to revise and even to reverse them. For example, it would be possible to present Dr. Smith as a great wielder of knife and scalpel, a slayer of disease, a marbled figure of power and grandeur.

           In the event, however, the surgeon seemed perfectly ordinary: not too short, nor too tall, and not too fat, though with a round face which was sometimes clouded, for his mouth could appear disapproving, and his brown eyes were somewhat assessive behind corrective lenses. On this June morning, dressed in his surgical garb, he wiggled his stiff fingers into latex gloves and felt how recalcitrant they were as he forced them in. Last night had been what he called a long, hard night, but let bygones be bygones, he thought. Smiling and a bit bleary, he strode confidently into the brightly lit surgical theater. He would perform an exploratory, which he invariably enjoyed.

           The poor girl was dying, but now prepped and anesthetized, she was stretched out on the operating table.

           “Good morning, Dr. Smith,” the nurses and the new anesthesiologist, Dr. Maury, said – he was a handsome man; swarthy was the term. The line of his strong neck led down to broad shoulders and what looked to be a lean, fine physique. Dr. Maury smiled politely at him, and Dr. Smith immediately turned to look at what was on the menu today.

           The skin of the abdomen was bared before him as he picked up the scalpel with his stiffened fingers. Perhaps he would give her a few months more of life, he thought as he automatically cut through flesh, fat, and muscle. His nurse placed clamps and a drain so no blood welled in the cavity. At its bottom, there it was, the pancreas riddled with cancer. Searching for spreading metastases in liver and spleen, his rough fingers pushed the pancreas aside.

           The heart monitor began irregularly to beep, and it stopped.

           “Dr. Smith, her heart has…”

           A slight tremor convulsed the body on the table, and Dr. Smith pulled his bloody gloved hands away.

           “Adrenaline. Syringe,” he said as he glanced about, numb and unsteady. Dr. Maury was staring alarmed at him.

           He plunged the needle into the heart. Immediately, he knew it had missed its target, and he lifted, shifted, and plunged it once more into the chamber of the heart.

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The novel is a fictionalized memoir about my family, with names changed. My late parents were secular Jews and devoted to classical music. Of my two (retired) brothers, one is a photographer, and the other is a poet. Something like the novel’s disaster at work and desperation at home did descend on the family around the year 1962, though at the time I was away from home as a freshman in college. The four family member take up the telling of the chapters, though I do record and comment in the telling. For the most part, then, I leave myself out of the tale – which may be the best way to put yourself in, as I mention a novelist friend of mine told me.

Here’s a brief summary of the novel:   It is the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Cold War hydrogen bomb testing. Dr. Morris Weisberg studies the effects of nuclear radiation and the causes of cancer, and he, his wife, and their turbulent sons live in suburban Los Angeles. Each family member strives to find some pleasure and affirmation, whether in science, art, sex or music, as they face the distortion and emptiness beneath the surface beauty of California life. Dr. Weisberg is Chief of Laboratory at the Montecito Veterans Hospital, where a surgeon causes a death during an operation. When Morris discovers the truth, his Hospital Director tries to cover up the malpractice. Crises descend, then, at work as well as in the family.

The novel is rich and compelling for its drama of emotional abuse and sexual awakening, its non-nostalgic view of L.A. in the sixties and of growing up as well as growing old there, and its picture of the explosion of American power in the Kennedy years. There are also the roles played by science and music in the life of Morris Weisberg, the sense of Jewish-American identity after the Holocaust, and finally the occasional humorous echo of Don Quixote.

Pathological States - a novel

In an earlier post, there's an excerpt from my unpublished novel "Pathological States" about a physician and his family living in Los Angeles in 1962. The novel is partly a fictionalized family memoir centered on a character a little like my late father, Dr. Perry Melnick, who was a pathologist and noted histochemist. Here's a brief summary:

"Pathological States - a novel"

It is 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eichmann’s execution, and above-ground nuclear testing. Dr. Morris Weisberg is a sixty-year-old pathologist, amateur violinist, and classical music lover. He discovers a disastrous instance of malpractice and a cover-up reaching to the office of his Hospital Director. During this year, the troubled, quixotic doctor struggles to find a way to confront the crisis.

Morris and his wife, Sandra, were born in Europe near the start of the twentieth century, and each was brought to America at an early age. In 1962, the couple is living in suburbia, in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. They have two sons. Both are aspiring artists in their twenties, and one is straight, the other gay. As they test limits and act out their resentments, the household begins to fill with revelations of excess and abuse.

At work and at home, communication fails, brutal buried truths erupt, and Morris begins to descend into maddening depression. He seeks refuge in his love of classical music and in his California garden. His glassed-in lanai there offers him solace – a place like L.A. itself of pleasure and escape, which ends up being a haunted, alienated space. As Morris plummets, his struggle to keep affirming his faith in science and music wavers. Dr. Weisberg becomes a powerfully moving, larger-than-life character, noble and destructive and terrifying.

Radiation and the destruction of the future

The passage of time since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster offers some perspective on the threat to nuclear installations posed by severe earthquakes and tidal waves. As the concern over the August earthquake in Virginia shows, it remains an issue whether the nuclear plants across the United States, with their long record of shut-downs, would hold up under the conditions which prevailed in Japan last March.

A question that haunts the newspaper and magazine reports is one I was taught to ask by my late father, Dr. Perry Melnick, a pathologist researching the effect of radiation on our cells. That question is how close the residents of an affected region – now especially Japan – came to being exposed to the mutilating effect of radiation on human genes. [Radiation's potential assault on genetic inheritance is one focus of my new novel Acts of Terror and Contrition: a nuclear fable. - see the side bar links. ]

Our awareness of the destructiveness of radiation grew exponentially in the aftermath of America’s atomic bombing of two Japanese cities at the end of World War Two, but scientific knowledge of those effects began to develop earlier in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, for example, my father published his research into “the deleterious effects of radiation on human subjects.” When the earthquake in Japan spurred the tsunami, the critical failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and the release of radiation into the environment, I thought about what my father’s response would have been.

The sloppiness of maintenance, the lax attitude toward the storage of nuclear material, and the risks taken by the nuclear industry and accepted by the Japanese government – all these would have earned my father’s censure. And he would be shocked by the generally cavalier attitude prevailing today toward the nuclear radiation generated by power plants – including those throughout the United States.  My father would also have seen the disaster at Fukushima as an opportunity to alert us to our responsibility to eliminate from the planet poorly designed, sloppily maintained, and dangerously positioned nuclear energy installations. The Japanese crisis presents a “teachable moment,” an object lesson about radiation’s danger to future generations and to all organic life on Earth.

My own first lesson as a child about such dangers was a gift given by my Uncle Alvin to my family living then in Los Angeles; he was an economist working with General MacArthur during the occupation of Japan, and his present to us was a four inch square roofing tile found near the Sairenji Temple at the Hiroshima explosion center. I have it here before me. The tile is smooth and very hard, except that half of one side is darkened and eaten away by the immense heat of the atomic bomb explosion.

My second lesson was offered by my father in the early 1950s. He instructed me about the absurdity of my elementary school’s atomic bomb drills, when the bell would ring its alarm and we fourth-graders would assume a crouching position beneath our little desks. He explained in simple terms that the school and the whole city would likely be vaporized. Those who survived would bear the stigmata of radioactive fallout’s effects in their genes and so pass on a deformed genetic inheritance to the next generation. In the early 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, I remember his outrage at the resumption of atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs, pumping bursts of radioactivity into the air we breathe.

Of course, my father did not reject all uses of nuclear radiation, for his research helped to validate its medical applications, notably in the treatment of cancer. But he would have insisted that the Fukushima nuclear disaster must serve to show us how irresponsible and immoral is an unthinking and passive attitude toward the dangers of radiation.

Thirty years ago, Jonathan Schell explained that “the fate of the earth” is at stake, and he eloquently called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons and the strict control of nuclear power. As research has revealed for a century, the consequences of multiple releases of radiation into the environment are a geometric increase in cancer rates and in irremediable genetic mutations. The crisis at Fukushima Daiichi should remind us that the destruction of the future is the risk we face.