Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 4
June 30, 2020
Some people say that my wife's sister is a witch.
"Some people say that my wife’s sister is a witch."
So, begins Water Witches.
Greetings, my friends,
Water Witches is the earliest of my novels that I allow to remain in print. It was originally published in 1995 and it’s about — wait for it — global climate change. It’s a magical realist novel about a group of dowsers (or water witches), a cataclysmic Vermont drought, and a lobbyist so slick that his sister-in-law expects plates to slip through his hands. It is, in some ways, among the most autobiographic novels I’ve written.
And today, a brand new 25th Anniversary Edition paperback goes on sale. (I love the new cover.)
It is also available in a fantastic audio production, thanks to Kaleo Griffith and Kim Mai Guest, and you can listen to a preview clip right here:
https://soundcloud.com/penguin-audio/...
The new edition includes an essay I wrote about the novel’s origins and its eerie prescience. Sure, there were no smart phones or social networks in 1995, but even then we could see the ways the world — the literal climate and the ground on which we walk — was changing, and how we were the culprits. You can read all about it on my web site:
https://chrisbohjalian.com/water-witc...
Finally, it is one of my few novels with. . .jokes. Yes, a lot of my books are about heartbreak and dread. But Water Witches? Those emotions are leavened by my love for Vermont and my love for family: what it means to be a parent and a spouse.
Fingers crossed my work never disappoints you.
Stay safe; stay sane; wear masks.
And, as always, thank you.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter
PS: Want a personalized copy of the novel? Visit the Vermont Bookshop and ask me to sign one in the Comments block when you check out:
https://www.vermontbookshop.com/book/...
So, begins Water Witches.
Greetings, my friends,
Water Witches is the earliest of my novels that I allow to remain in print. It was originally published in 1995 and it’s about — wait for it — global climate change. It’s a magical realist novel about a group of dowsers (or water witches), a cataclysmic Vermont drought, and a lobbyist so slick that his sister-in-law expects plates to slip through his hands. It is, in some ways, among the most autobiographic novels I’ve written.
And today, a brand new 25th Anniversary Edition paperback goes on sale. (I love the new cover.)
It is also available in a fantastic audio production, thanks to Kaleo Griffith and Kim Mai Guest, and you can listen to a preview clip right here:
https://soundcloud.com/penguin-audio/...
The new edition includes an essay I wrote about the novel’s origins and its eerie prescience. Sure, there were no smart phones or social networks in 1995, but even then we could see the ways the world — the literal climate and the ground on which we walk — was changing, and how we were the culprits. You can read all about it on my web site:
https://chrisbohjalian.com/water-witc...
Finally, it is one of my few novels with. . .jokes. Yes, a lot of my books are about heartbreak and dread. But Water Witches? Those emotions are leavened by my love for Vermont and my love for family: what it means to be a parent and a spouse.
Fingers crossed my work never disappoints you.
Stay safe; stay sane; wear masks.
And, as always, thank you.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter
PS: Want a personalized copy of the novel? Visit the Vermont Bookshop and ask me to sign one in the Comments block when you check out:
https://www.vermontbookshop.com/book/...
June 6, 2020
Omaha was no walk on the beach
76 years ago today, DDay, the Allies returned to France. In 2009, I wrote about one American who was there, my neighbor Ron Hadley. Here's his story. I don't imagine those soldiers fought fascism, ever expecting to see its ugly head here.
********
by Chris Bohjalian
Sixty-five years ago today, Middlebury’s Ron Hadley was strolling down the streets of Weymouth, an English Channel port southwest of London, in his U.S. Navy’s ensign uniform.
Sixty-five years ago yesterday he was skippering a 50-foot long landing craft through the rough waves at Omaha Beach on Normandy, the water around him churned high by the vast armada of boats and — as he approached the beach — the wind riddled with the rapid fire blasts of German 88-millimeter guns firing anti-personnel shells. He was a right flank commander of his wave of landing craft during the D-Day invasion and the eventual liberation of Europe from Hitler’s Germany.
He would pilot his LCM (landing craft medium) from the troop ship to the beach twice, the first time about 6:30 in the morning and the second time close to noon. Initially, he was a part of the fifth wave of boats, but the signalman at the picket boat about 2,000 yards from shore told him to ignore the planned pace and get to the beach as quickly as possible because the G.I.s were getting slaughtered and they needed men on the beach now. And so that first time Ron reached the shore he was actually in the midst of the second and third waves.
“I had 36 combat engineers on board and when we let down the ramp the Germans had set up a cross fire across our bow. Those 36 men never made it more than a few yards from the boat. They never made it on to the beach,” he recalls. When he was back at the shore five hours later with another three dozen men, the invasion had a foothold: This time his soldiers made it to the sand. On a ridge in the distance he even saw a column of German soldiers who had surrendered. Nevertheless, among the longest hours of his life were when he was ferrying that second group of soldiers to the landing site, because he couldn’t help but wonder if he was bringing them all to a certain death.
I had known Ron nearly two decades before I learned what he had endured and accomplished on June 6, 1944. Like so many veterans he doesn’t talk about it much. When he’d lived in Lincoln, we served together as board members on a senior citizen housing project in town. He had also been one of the leaders of the effort to raise the money to build a new library in the village. He was, as far as I knew, a retired executive who had had a successful career with AT&T, a guy from northern California who at some point had discovered Vermont and the small village we both called home. When I thought of him, I thought mostly of the hours he volunteered on behalf of the community and his gravelly, good-natured laugh.
At the time, I had no idea that he had been a part of the invasion of Normandy. Or, months later, the invasion of southern France. And in 1945 the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. “But D-Day,” he recalls now, “was the most startling, the most dramatic, the most horrible — and the most memorable.”
As soon as he had graduated from San Jose State University in 1943, he would go east to the Columbia University Midshipman School. He would train there, then in Norfolk, Va., and finally at Loch Long in Scotland.
He still has the slender topographic map he used that morning 65 years ago: The elevation of the hills just beyond the beach, the church steeple that was one of his key landmarks. He has been back to the American cemetery on the bluff overlooking the beach. He’s 87 now, a part of that greatest generation, and he is more comfortable discussing those experiences today than he was 10 years ago:
“It took me a long, long time before I could talk about it. But people should know what took place — that people were giving up their lives for something that mattered. It’s important that people know about that moment in history.”
Indeed. And it’s important that we remember people like Ron.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 7, 2009. Chris's most recent novel, THE RED LOTUS, was published in March.)
********
by Chris Bohjalian
Sixty-five years ago today, Middlebury’s Ron Hadley was strolling down the streets of Weymouth, an English Channel port southwest of London, in his U.S. Navy’s ensign uniform.
Sixty-five years ago yesterday he was skippering a 50-foot long landing craft through the rough waves at Omaha Beach on Normandy, the water around him churned high by the vast armada of boats and — as he approached the beach — the wind riddled with the rapid fire blasts of German 88-millimeter guns firing anti-personnel shells. He was a right flank commander of his wave of landing craft during the D-Day invasion and the eventual liberation of Europe from Hitler’s Germany.
He would pilot his LCM (landing craft medium) from the troop ship to the beach twice, the first time about 6:30 in the morning and the second time close to noon. Initially, he was a part of the fifth wave of boats, but the signalman at the picket boat about 2,000 yards from shore told him to ignore the planned pace and get to the beach as quickly as possible because the G.I.s were getting slaughtered and they needed men on the beach now. And so that first time Ron reached the shore he was actually in the midst of the second and third waves.
“I had 36 combat engineers on board and when we let down the ramp the Germans had set up a cross fire across our bow. Those 36 men never made it more than a few yards from the boat. They never made it on to the beach,” he recalls. When he was back at the shore five hours later with another three dozen men, the invasion had a foothold: This time his soldiers made it to the sand. On a ridge in the distance he even saw a column of German soldiers who had surrendered. Nevertheless, among the longest hours of his life were when he was ferrying that second group of soldiers to the landing site, because he couldn’t help but wonder if he was bringing them all to a certain death.
I had known Ron nearly two decades before I learned what he had endured and accomplished on June 6, 1944. Like so many veterans he doesn’t talk about it much. When he’d lived in Lincoln, we served together as board members on a senior citizen housing project in town. He had also been one of the leaders of the effort to raise the money to build a new library in the village. He was, as far as I knew, a retired executive who had had a successful career with AT&T, a guy from northern California who at some point had discovered Vermont and the small village we both called home. When I thought of him, I thought mostly of the hours he volunteered on behalf of the community and his gravelly, good-natured laugh.
At the time, I had no idea that he had been a part of the invasion of Normandy. Or, months later, the invasion of southern France. And in 1945 the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. “But D-Day,” he recalls now, “was the most startling, the most dramatic, the most horrible — and the most memorable.”
As soon as he had graduated from San Jose State University in 1943, he would go east to the Columbia University Midshipman School. He would train there, then in Norfolk, Va., and finally at Loch Long in Scotland.
He still has the slender topographic map he used that morning 65 years ago: The elevation of the hills just beyond the beach, the church steeple that was one of his key landmarks. He has been back to the American cemetery on the bluff overlooking the beach. He’s 87 now, a part of that greatest generation, and he is more comfortable discussing those experiences today than he was 10 years ago:
“It took me a long, long time before I could talk about it. But people should know what took place — that people were giving up their lives for something that mattered. It’s important that people know about that moment in history.”
Indeed. And it’s important that we remember people like Ron.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 7, 2009. Chris's most recent novel, THE RED LOTUS, was published in March.)
April 21, 2020
The Short Stories I Found in the Sweater Box
When I was cleaning out my father’s home after he died, I came across a sweater box under his bed. In it were some of the short stories I had written in the third and fourth grade. For a few minutes I sat on the floor and read them, recalling the bedroom in Connecticut in which I had penned them decades earlier, my teachers, and the inspirations for the tales. A couple of times I had to blink back tears, because here was one more indication of how very much my parents had loved me: my mother had saved these stories for years, and then, after she died in 1995, my father had preserved them.
Now, it’s also possible that I was on the verge of crying because the stories were absolute train wrecks. Nowhere in them could I find what a creative writing professor might generously have called promise. (I must admit, I did take a little pride in my penmanship. My lettering would have made a medieval monk proud.)
But I was struck by how I could see, even in that “apprentice work”, two themes that would resonate in my novels as an adult: heartbreak and dread. When my books work – and heaven knows they do not always work – those are the points on the narrative compass that matter most. The stories ranged from a tale of a disembodied hand emerging from a wishing well to one about sibling rivalry on the school bus safety patrol. Another ended with this sentence: “The dripping stopped and the vultures had their meal.”
There’s often a deep connection for writers between what we read for pleasure and what we write. It’s not always direct: it’s not as if novelists known for writing horror only read horror. (On the other hand, one piece of advice I often give fledging writers is this: write the sort of thing you love to read most. If you love science fiction, write that. If you savor what we call literary fiction, let those books be your inspiration.)
But I know that Esther Forbes’s Revolutionary War saga, Johnny Tremaine, a novel about a 14-year-old apprentice silversmith with a crippling hand injury, influenced what I was writing in third grade. I still recall the last line with all of its metaphoric gravitas: “A man can stand up.”
Likewise, one week in fourth grade when I was home sick from school, I devoured Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a ghost story that to this day scares the hell out of me. I’m sure at nine years old I missed Eleanor Vance’s emotional instability and the sadness of her adulthood prior to joining the ghost hunters at Hill House, but I have never forgotten the riveting scene when she jumps from her bed in the night and cries out to her roommate, Theodora, “God! God! – Whose hand was I holding?”
Those two books for me were all about my dual lodestars of heartbreak and dread. To this day, that is what I seem to crave in my reading, whether all is right with the world or we are living in one of those moments in history that we will look back on and think to ourselves, “I know exactly where I was when. . .” I recall finishing Howard Frank Mosher’s A Stranger in the Kingdom on the front steps of my home in Vermont on a carefree Saturday afternoon in June, the sky cloudless and cerulean, savoring the wistfulness that washed over me and it made no sense given the kind of day it was. When I read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird aloud to my daughter when she was in third grade, we were both a little unmoored by the quiver in my voice as I read the last page – and especially when it broke on that last paragraph:
“He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
We still have a totemic connection to books made of paper. I love audiobooks on my phone and on occasion I have even read novels on the device. But most books I read are hardcovers or paperbacks. My fiction is alphabetized by author, but I actually have a special section in my library for those books that left me feeling a little broken and a little fragile when I turned the last page – because those are my favorites. Those are the ones I have, on occasion, read two and three and even four times.
Sometimes I wonder what my parents thought when they perused those stories their son had written as a boy. Did they worry about the darkness in them? The sadness? I wasn’t a melancholic child. I’m not a morose adult. But then I remind myself that my mother was an avid — almost ferocious — reader; I still have her editions of some of her favorite novels. She probably saw in my short stories the books and movies that had triggered them. She very likely understood that, whether it’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Tales from the Crypt, children are often drawn to fiction that touches the darkest recesses of the soul.
And so mostly when I look at those handwritten stories, the blue ink on the white lined paper, I recall that among the great gifts my loving parents gave me was a love of reading in the first place.
++++++++
Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant, among many other books. His most recent bestselling novel, The Red Lotus, was published in March. This essay appeared originally in "We Found Time," on April 20, 2020.
Now, it’s also possible that I was on the verge of crying because the stories were absolute train wrecks. Nowhere in them could I find what a creative writing professor might generously have called promise. (I must admit, I did take a little pride in my penmanship. My lettering would have made a medieval monk proud.)
But I was struck by how I could see, even in that “apprentice work”, two themes that would resonate in my novels as an adult: heartbreak and dread. When my books work – and heaven knows they do not always work – those are the points on the narrative compass that matter most. The stories ranged from a tale of a disembodied hand emerging from a wishing well to one about sibling rivalry on the school bus safety patrol. Another ended with this sentence: “The dripping stopped and the vultures had their meal.”
There’s often a deep connection for writers between what we read for pleasure and what we write. It’s not always direct: it’s not as if novelists known for writing horror only read horror. (On the other hand, one piece of advice I often give fledging writers is this: write the sort of thing you love to read most. If you love science fiction, write that. If you savor what we call literary fiction, let those books be your inspiration.)
But I know that Esther Forbes’s Revolutionary War saga, Johnny Tremaine, a novel about a 14-year-old apprentice silversmith with a crippling hand injury, influenced what I was writing in third grade. I still recall the last line with all of its metaphoric gravitas: “A man can stand up.”
Likewise, one week in fourth grade when I was home sick from school, I devoured Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a ghost story that to this day scares the hell out of me. I’m sure at nine years old I missed Eleanor Vance’s emotional instability and the sadness of her adulthood prior to joining the ghost hunters at Hill House, but I have never forgotten the riveting scene when she jumps from her bed in the night and cries out to her roommate, Theodora, “God! God! – Whose hand was I holding?”
Those two books for me were all about my dual lodestars of heartbreak and dread. To this day, that is what I seem to crave in my reading, whether all is right with the world or we are living in one of those moments in history that we will look back on and think to ourselves, “I know exactly where I was when. . .” I recall finishing Howard Frank Mosher’s A Stranger in the Kingdom on the front steps of my home in Vermont on a carefree Saturday afternoon in June, the sky cloudless and cerulean, savoring the wistfulness that washed over me and it made no sense given the kind of day it was. When I read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird aloud to my daughter when she was in third grade, we were both a little unmoored by the quiver in my voice as I read the last page – and especially when it broke on that last paragraph:
“He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
We still have a totemic connection to books made of paper. I love audiobooks on my phone and on occasion I have even read novels on the device. But most books I read are hardcovers or paperbacks. My fiction is alphabetized by author, but I actually have a special section in my library for those books that left me feeling a little broken and a little fragile when I turned the last page – because those are my favorites. Those are the ones I have, on occasion, read two and three and even four times.
Sometimes I wonder what my parents thought when they perused those stories their son had written as a boy. Did they worry about the darkness in them? The sadness? I wasn’t a melancholic child. I’m not a morose adult. But then I remind myself that my mother was an avid — almost ferocious — reader; I still have her editions of some of her favorite novels. She probably saw in my short stories the books and movies that had triggered them. She very likely understood that, whether it’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Tales from the Crypt, children are often drawn to fiction that touches the darkest recesses of the soul.
And so mostly when I look at those handwritten stories, the blue ink on the white lined paper, I recall that among the great gifts my loving parents gave me was a love of reading in the first place.
++++++++
Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant, among many other books. His most recent bestselling novel, The Red Lotus, was published in March. This essay appeared originally in "We Found Time," on April 20, 2020.
March 27, 2020
My Top 5's: Inspirations and Places to Write and [Dead] Writers
Grateful to Daneet Steffens for her review of THE RED LOTUS in the Seattle Review of Books ("As always, Bohjalian creates a mesmerizing tale, a timely socio-political-business story with human frailties, illusions, dis-illusions, and strengths firmly at its center."), and asking me for my Top 5s!
Here is the full review and my complete list of Top 5's:
The Quintessential Interview: Chris Bohjalian
In the opening pages of The Red Lotus (Doubleday) a nurse, Alexis, and a hospital administrator, Austin, meet kind-of-cute during one chaotic Saturday night in the ER. Well, apart from the bullet in Austin’s arm that is – and apart from the fact that in a Bohjalian book, the course of most things, including true love, rarely run particularly smoothly. Six months down the road, Alexis and Austin, still in their honeymoon phase, are on a biking trip in Vietnam when Austin goes missing. Alexis, a formidable woman who readily applies her ER nursing skills to deciphering the sudden mystery, quickly becomes the most compelling voice in this story: with each of her discoveries, the central puzzle both deepens and expands. As always, Bohjalian creates a mesmerizing tale, a timely socio-political-business story with human frailties, illusions, dis-illusions, and strengths firmly at its center.
What or who are your top five writing inspirations?
1) Riding my bike. I do so much writing while riding: I solve narrative arcs, decide who will live and die (and why), and sometimes stop and write whole scenes on my phone.
2) Reading. I always have two or three books going and they always inspire me.
3) Watching movie or TV series trailers. I watch two or three every morning before I start writing.
4) The dictionary. I love words: luminescent. Cerulean. Noctivagant. I always skim the dictionary before starting work.
5) Great streaming TV or a great movie. Breaking Bad and Mad Men changed my life. Now everything I write needs to be awash in heartbreak and dread.
Top five places to write?
1) My study in Vermont with my cat, Horton, in my lap, and my dog, Jesse, asleep in her dog bed behind me.
2) A summer day, resting at mile 35 on a 50- or 60-mile bike ride, typing feverishly into my phone as I inhale an omelette and a cappuccino for sustenance.
3) The Amtrak train between Albany and Manhattan, watching the Hudson River from my window.
4) A really good bar. I wrote the opening to The Flight Attendant and a bunch of key scenes in The Red Lotus in bars.
5) An airline lounge at an airport that has artery-clogging chunks of cheese and terrible crackers.
Top five favorite authors?
Nope. Forgive me. I have too many writers who are friends. But I will tell you that among my top five dead writers might be
1) Emily Dickinson (she even appears in one of my books)
2) F Scott Fitzgerald
3) Tom Wolfe
4) Patricia Highsmith
5) Howard Frank Mosher
Top five tunes to write to?
I write in utter silence. But five songs that can inspire me are:
1) "Stockton Gala Days” by 10,000 Maniacs, especially the live version
2) "Heroes” — in German — by David Bowie (I discovered it during the closing credits to Jojo Rabbit)
3" "Out of Time” by the Rolling Stones
4) "Hero” by Family of the Year
5) “I Was Here” by Beyoncé
Top five hometown spots?
1) The Lake Champlain Bridge that spans (surprise) Lake Champlain at a narrow point and links Vermont and New York
2) The Middlebury Marquis movie theatre. You watch flicks on couches, eat really good burritos, and drink really good margaritas.
3) The Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury. The place is historic: Robert Frost would sit in a leather chair and peruse the books he had pulled down from the shelves.
4) Monroe Street Books — imagine a used bookstore the size of a supermarket.
5) Shelburne Farms — a restaurant and bed and breakfast on Lake Champlain, originally the late 19th century William Seward and Lila Vanderbilt Webb estate. It’s gorgeous: the grounds were landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted. Even the “farm barn” makes me feel like I am visiting (warning, Game of Thrones reference, dead ahead) Winterfell.
Here is the full review and my complete list of Top 5's:
The Quintessential Interview: Chris Bohjalian
In the opening pages of The Red Lotus (Doubleday) a nurse, Alexis, and a hospital administrator, Austin, meet kind-of-cute during one chaotic Saturday night in the ER. Well, apart from the bullet in Austin’s arm that is – and apart from the fact that in a Bohjalian book, the course of most things, including true love, rarely run particularly smoothly. Six months down the road, Alexis and Austin, still in their honeymoon phase, are on a biking trip in Vietnam when Austin goes missing. Alexis, a formidable woman who readily applies her ER nursing skills to deciphering the sudden mystery, quickly becomes the most compelling voice in this story: with each of her discoveries, the central puzzle both deepens and expands. As always, Bohjalian creates a mesmerizing tale, a timely socio-political-business story with human frailties, illusions, dis-illusions, and strengths firmly at its center.
What or who are your top five writing inspirations?
1) Riding my bike. I do so much writing while riding: I solve narrative arcs, decide who will live and die (and why), and sometimes stop and write whole scenes on my phone.
2) Reading. I always have two or three books going and they always inspire me.
3) Watching movie or TV series trailers. I watch two or three every morning before I start writing.
4) The dictionary. I love words: luminescent. Cerulean. Noctivagant. I always skim the dictionary before starting work.
5) Great streaming TV or a great movie. Breaking Bad and Mad Men changed my life. Now everything I write needs to be awash in heartbreak and dread.
Top five places to write?
1) My study in Vermont with my cat, Horton, in my lap, and my dog, Jesse, asleep in her dog bed behind me.
2) A summer day, resting at mile 35 on a 50- or 60-mile bike ride, typing feverishly into my phone as I inhale an omelette and a cappuccino for sustenance.
3) The Amtrak train between Albany and Manhattan, watching the Hudson River from my window.
4) A really good bar. I wrote the opening to The Flight Attendant and a bunch of key scenes in The Red Lotus in bars.
5) An airline lounge at an airport that has artery-clogging chunks of cheese and terrible crackers.
Top five favorite authors?
Nope. Forgive me. I have too many writers who are friends. But I will tell you that among my top five dead writers might be
1) Emily Dickinson (she even appears in one of my books)
2) F Scott Fitzgerald
3) Tom Wolfe
4) Patricia Highsmith
5) Howard Frank Mosher
Top five tunes to write to?
I write in utter silence. But five songs that can inspire me are:
1) "Stockton Gala Days” by 10,000 Maniacs, especially the live version
2) "Heroes” — in German — by David Bowie (I discovered it during the closing credits to Jojo Rabbit)
3" "Out of Time” by the Rolling Stones
4) "Hero” by Family of the Year
5) “I Was Here” by Beyoncé
Top five hometown spots?
1) The Lake Champlain Bridge that spans (surprise) Lake Champlain at a narrow point and links Vermont and New York
2) The Middlebury Marquis movie theatre. You watch flicks on couches, eat really good burritos, and drink really good margaritas.
3) The Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury. The place is historic: Robert Frost would sit in a leather chair and peruse the books he had pulled down from the shelves.
4) Monroe Street Books — imagine a used bookstore the size of a supermarket.
5) Shelburne Farms — a restaurant and bed and breakfast on Lake Champlain, originally the late 19th century William Seward and Lila Vanderbilt Webb estate. It’s gorgeous: the grounds were landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted. Even the “farm barn” makes me feel like I am visiting (warning, Game of Thrones reference, dead ahead) Winterfell.
March 19, 2020
The New York Times Review of THE RED LOTUS
I don't normally do this. But I am gobsmacked and grateful. Truly humbled.
Sarah Lyall of the New York Times has weighed in on The Red Lotus:
“Terrific. . .[an] elegant noose of a plot. . .Bohjalian is a pleasure to read. He writes muscular, clear, propulsive sentences. . .As suspenseful as it is, The Red Lotus is also unexpectedly moving — about friendship, about the connections between people and, most of all, about the love of parents for children and of children for parents. Bohjalian is a writer with a big heart and deep compassion for his characters.” — Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
Here is the link to the full review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/bo...
My deepest thanks to Sarah Lyall and the New York Times -- and to all of you here on Goodreads for your faith in my work.
Sarah Lyall of the New York Times has weighed in on The Red Lotus:
“Terrific. . .[an] elegant noose of a plot. . .Bohjalian is a pleasure to read. He writes muscular, clear, propulsive sentences. . .As suspenseful as it is, The Red Lotus is also unexpectedly moving — about friendship, about the connections between people and, most of all, about the love of parents for children and of children for parents. Bohjalian is a writer with a big heart and deep compassion for his characters.” — Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
Here is the link to the full review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/bo...
My deepest thanks to Sarah Lyall and the New York Times -- and to all of you here on Goodreads for your faith in my work.
March 18, 2020
IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM, DOCTORS NEED DETECTIVE SKILLS—AND EMPATHY: Why Chris Bohjalian went looking for inspiration in the ER
A tenacious ER doctor is the heroine in my new thriller about a deadly pathogen, THE RED LOTUS. My time researching the novel with ER doctors left me gobsmacked and grateful. They ARE going to get sick as a part of our front line of defense in this pandemic. Thank God they are strong, empathetic, and courageous -- and have great senses of humor. Here is an essay I wrote about them, and why the star of THE RED LOTUS works in a New York City emergency room.
This essay appeared originally this week in Crime Reads.
++++++++
Ask ER docs for the most bizarre things they’ve ever seen in the emergency room and, invariably, they will tell you tales of inappropriate objects they have plucked from different parts of the human body. One ER doctor showed me the X-rays of them she keeps on her phone. Others will tell you of the little kids who’ve eaten Legos (lots of Legos) or wedged tiny Barbie stilettos up even tinier nostrils.
But then they’ll sit back and tell you why they choose the emergency room—and the answers surprised me. I expected they were all adrenaline junkies. And while some admit they take satisfaction in saving lives when the ER has become the sort of apocalyptic madness we see on TV, many of them are actually closet detectives and view their work rather cerebrally. As Mike Kiernan, an ER doc in Middlebury, Vermont told me, “Don’t forget: Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician before he created Sherlock Holmes.”
Holmes, of course, was the literary world’s first great sleuth, a fictional detective who, in essence, used one of a doctor’s principal tools to solve crime: pattern recognition. (Recall how important deductive reasoning was to the master detective: “You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”) When it isn’t, for instance, a broken leg from a skiing accident or a deep gash on the thumb from slicing a bagel—one of the more common reasons people wind up in New York City emergency rooms on the weekend—it’s about deciphering the clues. Is this college student’s headache a migraine or is he simply hungover? Or is there more to it than that? Does this elderly woman have the flu or is it an entirely new virus? Being an ER detective can be especially challenging because, often enough, you are seeing someone in the small hours of the morning, or you’re exhausted from a 12 hour shift, or it’s one of those moments when the ER really is in chaos.
And then there is the danger: during a pandemic, ER doctors are on the front lines and many of them will wind up sick themselves. They work well aware of this risk.
I learned about ER docs while researching my new novel, The Red Lotus, because the main character is an emergency room physician. And an important part of who we are is what we are: what we do for a living. As a college freshman I took a literature course called “Perspectives on the Professions,” and it has stayed with me. We read books that focused on how characters were molded by their occupations, such as James Gould Cozzens’s classic courtroom drama, The Just and the Unjust, and Scott Turow’s account of his first year at Harvard Law School, One L. As Scott Fitzgerald taught us, “Action is character,” and a whole lot of the action in our lives occurs while we are at work.
As a novelist, my characters’ jobs are often critical to both who they are and what happens in the story. Sometimes, my books have even had titles that telegraph my obsession with the nexus between what we do and who we are: Midwives. The Flight Attendant. Water Witches.
The emergency room is also one of those places we all see and, often, we see when we are at our very worst. We are in quite literal pain, we may be scared, and we may even be embarrassed. (Another reason people wind up in emergency rooms? They have just tripped over their pet.) Our breath may be toxic because it’s three in the morning or we may be holding a small child in desperate need of a fresh diaper. Kiernan said you can always tell what season it is in Vermont by the injuries and illnesses he sees: the snowmobile versus the tractor, the flu versus Lyme disease.
And so, in addition to being detectives, I think ER doctors are especially empathetic—and they experience just as much trauma as any first responder. Talk to an ER doc or trauma surgeon who’s helped care for the wounded after a mass shooting and you will witness their countenance change almost the way a war veteran’s does while recalling combat. (And then there are those ER physicians such as Rebecca Siegel, who told me that when she was an EMT and first year medical student in Israel, she was among those attacked in a mass shooting, but was uninjured—and, thus, would be among those involved in patient triage.)
Those two personality attributes, investigative curiosity and empathy, were crucial in the creation of the main character in The Red Lotus, Alexis Remnick. The novel is a thriller about—among things—a cyclist who’s found dead on a bike tour in Vietnam, but it’s also about the legacies of the Vietnam War and what it means to discover the one we love has been lying to us all along. But there are myriad scenes set in a New York City emergency room, some of which reveal bits and pieces of who Alexis is as a human being and some of which are critical to move the plot forward. An example of the former is Alexis’s time in the ER cubicle with an elderly patient whose heartburn is likely the symptom of something much worse; an example of the latter is when she digs a bullet from the biceps of the man who will become her boyfriend and with whom she will journey to Vietnam.
But like all ER physicians, she is also asking questions and always trying to think outside the box – even when she realizes she herself is in spectacular amounts of danger.
And I think that gets at the main thing I learned while researching The Red Lotus: Sometimes the best detectives wear scrubs.
+++++
THE RED LOTUS is now on sale. Even in the midst of a quarantine, the novel is available wherever you buy or download books.
This essay appeared originally this week in Crime Reads.
++++++++
Ask ER docs for the most bizarre things they’ve ever seen in the emergency room and, invariably, they will tell you tales of inappropriate objects they have plucked from different parts of the human body. One ER doctor showed me the X-rays of them she keeps on her phone. Others will tell you of the little kids who’ve eaten Legos (lots of Legos) or wedged tiny Barbie stilettos up even tinier nostrils.
But then they’ll sit back and tell you why they choose the emergency room—and the answers surprised me. I expected they were all adrenaline junkies. And while some admit they take satisfaction in saving lives when the ER has become the sort of apocalyptic madness we see on TV, many of them are actually closet detectives and view their work rather cerebrally. As Mike Kiernan, an ER doc in Middlebury, Vermont told me, “Don’t forget: Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician before he created Sherlock Holmes.”
Holmes, of course, was the literary world’s first great sleuth, a fictional detective who, in essence, used one of a doctor’s principal tools to solve crime: pattern recognition. (Recall how important deductive reasoning was to the master detective: “You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”) When it isn’t, for instance, a broken leg from a skiing accident or a deep gash on the thumb from slicing a bagel—one of the more common reasons people wind up in New York City emergency rooms on the weekend—it’s about deciphering the clues. Is this college student’s headache a migraine or is he simply hungover? Or is there more to it than that? Does this elderly woman have the flu or is it an entirely new virus? Being an ER detective can be especially challenging because, often enough, you are seeing someone in the small hours of the morning, or you’re exhausted from a 12 hour shift, or it’s one of those moments when the ER really is in chaos.
And then there is the danger: during a pandemic, ER doctors are on the front lines and many of them will wind up sick themselves. They work well aware of this risk.
I learned about ER docs while researching my new novel, The Red Lotus, because the main character is an emergency room physician. And an important part of who we are is what we are: what we do for a living. As a college freshman I took a literature course called “Perspectives on the Professions,” and it has stayed with me. We read books that focused on how characters were molded by their occupations, such as James Gould Cozzens’s classic courtroom drama, The Just and the Unjust, and Scott Turow’s account of his first year at Harvard Law School, One L. As Scott Fitzgerald taught us, “Action is character,” and a whole lot of the action in our lives occurs while we are at work.
As a novelist, my characters’ jobs are often critical to both who they are and what happens in the story. Sometimes, my books have even had titles that telegraph my obsession with the nexus between what we do and who we are: Midwives. The Flight Attendant. Water Witches.
The emergency room is also one of those places we all see and, often, we see when we are at our very worst. We are in quite literal pain, we may be scared, and we may even be embarrassed. (Another reason people wind up in emergency rooms? They have just tripped over their pet.) Our breath may be toxic because it’s three in the morning or we may be holding a small child in desperate need of a fresh diaper. Kiernan said you can always tell what season it is in Vermont by the injuries and illnesses he sees: the snowmobile versus the tractor, the flu versus Lyme disease.
And so, in addition to being detectives, I think ER doctors are especially empathetic—and they experience just as much trauma as any first responder. Talk to an ER doc or trauma surgeon who’s helped care for the wounded after a mass shooting and you will witness their countenance change almost the way a war veteran’s does while recalling combat. (And then there are those ER physicians such as Rebecca Siegel, who told me that when she was an EMT and first year medical student in Israel, she was among those attacked in a mass shooting, but was uninjured—and, thus, would be among those involved in patient triage.)
Those two personality attributes, investigative curiosity and empathy, were crucial in the creation of the main character in The Red Lotus, Alexis Remnick. The novel is a thriller about—among things—a cyclist who’s found dead on a bike tour in Vietnam, but it’s also about the legacies of the Vietnam War and what it means to discover the one we love has been lying to us all along. But there are myriad scenes set in a New York City emergency room, some of which reveal bits and pieces of who Alexis is as a human being and some of which are critical to move the plot forward. An example of the former is Alexis’s time in the ER cubicle with an elderly patient whose heartburn is likely the symptom of something much worse; an example of the latter is when she digs a bullet from the biceps of the man who will become her boyfriend and with whom she will journey to Vietnam.
But like all ER physicians, she is also asking questions and always trying to think outside the box – even when she realizes she herself is in spectacular amounts of danger.
And I think that gets at the main thing I learned while researching The Red Lotus: Sometimes the best detectives wear scrubs.
+++++
THE RED LOTUS is now on sale. Even in the midst of a quarantine, the novel is available wherever you buy or download books.
March 15, 2020
The Wall Street Journal weighs in on The Red Lotus
JUST IN -- HERE IS THE WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEW OF THE RED LOTUS ("Deductive reasoning can take you only so far in a thriller as full of surprises as this one...Unexpected revelations extend to the final sentence."). Deepest thanks to critic Tom Nolan!
Mysteries: The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
An ER doctor doubts the official explanation given for the death of her boyfriend.
By Tom Nolan
Early in the course of Chris Bohjalian’s “The Red Lotus” (Doubleday, 383 pages, $27.95), protagonist Alexis Remnick, a 33-year-old Manhattan ER doctor, has cause to remember when she first learned that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had been a physician: “She wasn’t surprised. So much of what [doctors] did . . . was detective work based largely on deductive reasoning.”
When her boyfriend of half a year, Austin Harper, disappears during their bicycling tour of Vietnam and is later found dead, Alexis is faced with a situation that might stump even the sleuth of Baker Street. Austin and Alexis worked in the same New York hospital. He wanted to go to Vietnam, he said, to visit the sites of his father’s and uncle’s wartime service. That tour of homage sent him on the solo ride that led to his death—judged by the authorities to be a hit-and-run accident.
But why would even an experienced cyclist be riding on a remote rural road after dark? How could his right hand bear the mark of a wound supposedly caused by his road mishap but which left no mark on his riding glove? Austin’s parents, whom Alexis meets for the first time after returning to the States, are hostile to her notion that their son met with foul play. The condescending father asks: “Do you have issues with mental illness?” Austin’s supervisor thinks that there’s no point to further investigating Austin’s death: “It’s a tragedy, but not a crime.”
“The Red Lotus” is written through the alternate perspectives of a number of well-drawn characters. The reader thus gains access to the thoughts of those more sympathetic to Alexis and her doubt about Austin’s demise. These include an FBI attaché, a Vietnamese police officer and a New York private detective she hires—each of whom helps her begin to discern some answers. They soon surmise that Austin had hidden his true reason for going to Vietnam; could it have had something to do with laboratory research, involving rodents and diseases of pandemic potential, taking place at the hospital where Austin and Alexis both worked?
The good and bad hunches of Alexis and her allies propel her closer to the truth, while her Holmesian devotion to “pattern recognition” never ceases: “You asked questions. . . . You worked backwards, moving intellectually from effect to cause.” But deductive reasoning can take you only so far in a thriller as full of surprises as this one. Those who relished the sudden shocks and well-timed twists of Mr. Bohjalian’s 2018 work, “The Flight Attendant,” should be well-pleased by his latest book, whose unexpected revelations extend to the final sentence.
Mysteries: The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
An ER doctor doubts the official explanation given for the death of her boyfriend.
By Tom Nolan
Early in the course of Chris Bohjalian’s “The Red Lotus” (Doubleday, 383 pages, $27.95), protagonist Alexis Remnick, a 33-year-old Manhattan ER doctor, has cause to remember when she first learned that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had been a physician: “She wasn’t surprised. So much of what [doctors] did . . . was detective work based largely on deductive reasoning.”
When her boyfriend of half a year, Austin Harper, disappears during their bicycling tour of Vietnam and is later found dead, Alexis is faced with a situation that might stump even the sleuth of Baker Street. Austin and Alexis worked in the same New York hospital. He wanted to go to Vietnam, he said, to visit the sites of his father’s and uncle’s wartime service. That tour of homage sent him on the solo ride that led to his death—judged by the authorities to be a hit-and-run accident.
But why would even an experienced cyclist be riding on a remote rural road after dark? How could his right hand bear the mark of a wound supposedly caused by his road mishap but which left no mark on his riding glove? Austin’s parents, whom Alexis meets for the first time after returning to the States, are hostile to her notion that their son met with foul play. The condescending father asks: “Do you have issues with mental illness?” Austin’s supervisor thinks that there’s no point to further investigating Austin’s death: “It’s a tragedy, but not a crime.”
“The Red Lotus” is written through the alternate perspectives of a number of well-drawn characters. The reader thus gains access to the thoughts of those more sympathetic to Alexis and her doubt about Austin’s demise. These include an FBI attaché, a Vietnamese police officer and a New York private detective she hires—each of whom helps her begin to discern some answers. They soon surmise that Austin had hidden his true reason for going to Vietnam; could it have had something to do with laboratory research, involving rodents and diseases of pandemic potential, taking place at the hospital where Austin and Alexis both worked?
The good and bad hunches of Alexis and her allies propel her closer to the truth, while her Holmesian devotion to “pattern recognition” never ceases: “You asked questions. . . . You worked backwards, moving intellectually from effect to cause.” But deductive reasoning can take you only so far in a thriller as full of surprises as this one. Those who relished the sudden shocks and well-timed twists of Mr. Bohjalian’s 2018 work, “The Flight Attendant,” should be well-pleased by his latest book, whose unexpected revelations extend to the final sentence.
March 14, 2020
The Book Tour Tightrope
14 March 2020
Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends,
Let’s begin with what really matters: all of you. I hope I never lose sight of how blessed I am to have you in my literary life. It wasn’t all that long ago that the only people who bought my books lived on my (very) small street in Vermont or were my dad. He used to visit bookstores in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale and, if they had my new book, buy a copy. When they didn’t carry it, which was usually the case, he would tell the booksellers he was my dad and they really should stock it. Some booksellers told me he was always proud and polite — others that he was (note euphemism) passionate.
And so although THE RED LOTUS goes on sale this coming Tuesday, we are publishing it without a book tour. I am so sorry, because I love meeting you and I love bookstores and libraries.
But here is the book promotion tightrope: how do we keep you safe, but still support bookstores?
Moreover, all of you have been waiting patiently and I am deeply grateful.
THE RED LOTUS, “a diabolical plot reminiscent of a Robin Cook thriller” (Publishers Weekly) and “a dramatic dive into what happens when loves turns to agony" (Booklist), had its origins in my conversations with ER doctors, Vietnam veterans, and the scientists who work to create vaccines and combat disease. The result? A tale that begins with a dream vacation but mutates quickly into a nightmare.
Right here on Goodreads, of course, you can order your copy by clicking one of the buttons below "GET A COPY."
And if you want a signed copy? Also easy.
Very easy.
Here's another way we can celebrate this new book and support bookstores.
1. I signed thousands of copies of the novel this winter. Call your local bookstore and ask if they have some. They might!
or
2. You can get a signed book at bn.com.
or
3. If you want a signed AND personalized book, call any of these wonderful Vermont bookstores near my home before the close of day, March 21. I will sign AND personalize up to 200 copies at each store (600 total). They all ship.
- The Vermont Bookshop in Middlebury at 802 388-2061 or visit their website.
- Phoenix Books in Burlington at 802 448-3350 or visit their website.
- Barnes & Noble in South Burlington at 802 864-8001.
Please know that I am so appreciative of all of you. Thank you for your faith in my work. You are the best readers on the planet, and I never, ever want to disappoint you.
Now, stay safe. Be kind. And recall the words of Thich Nhat Hahn: “There can be no lotus flower without the mud.”
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends,
Let’s begin with what really matters: all of you. I hope I never lose sight of how blessed I am to have you in my literary life. It wasn’t all that long ago that the only people who bought my books lived on my (very) small street in Vermont or were my dad. He used to visit bookstores in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale and, if they had my new book, buy a copy. When they didn’t carry it, which was usually the case, he would tell the booksellers he was my dad and they really should stock it. Some booksellers told me he was always proud and polite — others that he was (note euphemism) passionate.
And so although THE RED LOTUS goes on sale this coming Tuesday, we are publishing it without a book tour. I am so sorry, because I love meeting you and I love bookstores and libraries.
But here is the book promotion tightrope: how do we keep you safe, but still support bookstores?
Moreover, all of you have been waiting patiently and I am deeply grateful.
THE RED LOTUS, “a diabolical plot reminiscent of a Robin Cook thriller” (Publishers Weekly) and “a dramatic dive into what happens when loves turns to agony" (Booklist), had its origins in my conversations with ER doctors, Vietnam veterans, and the scientists who work to create vaccines and combat disease. The result? A tale that begins with a dream vacation but mutates quickly into a nightmare.
Right here on Goodreads, of course, you can order your copy by clicking one of the buttons below "GET A COPY."
And if you want a signed copy? Also easy.
Very easy.
Here's another way we can celebrate this new book and support bookstores.
1. I signed thousands of copies of the novel this winter. Call your local bookstore and ask if they have some. They might!
or
2. You can get a signed book at bn.com.
or
3. If you want a signed AND personalized book, call any of these wonderful Vermont bookstores near my home before the close of day, March 21. I will sign AND personalize up to 200 copies at each store (600 total). They all ship.
- The Vermont Bookshop in Middlebury at 802 388-2061 or visit their website.
- Phoenix Books in Burlington at 802 448-3350 or visit their website.
- Barnes & Noble in South Burlington at 802 864-8001.
Please know that I am so appreciative of all of you. Thank you for your faith in my work. You are the best readers on the planet, and I never, ever want to disappoint you.
Now, stay safe. Be kind. And recall the words of Thich Nhat Hahn: “There can be no lotus flower without the mud.”
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
February 29, 2020
The Prologue to The Red Lotus
Good morning -- and Happy Saturday,
It's the weekend and, just maybe, your life has slowed down a tad.
If that's the case, here's a little reading that I hope with all my heart you enjoy: the prologue to my March 17 thriller, THE RED LOTUS.
Fingers crossed my work never disappoints any of you.
All the best,
Chris B.
********
Prologue
by Chris Bohjalian
The opposite of a hospice? Not a maternity ward or a NICU. It’s a trick question.
The correct answer? An emergency room. In a hospice, you do everything you can to allow people to die. In the ER? You do all that you can to keep them alive.
It was why she loved the ER, especially the night shift in the city. The relentlessness. The frenetic drive to keep a heart beating or to get someone breathing. Oh, sometimes you lost. You called it. You declared the suicide or the stroke victim or the accidental overdose dead. But far more often you won. Or, at least, you won long enough to get the patient into the OR or into a room upstairs, you won long enough that whatever happened to the man or woman or child or toddler or (dear God) baby was someone else’s problem. And so she became a different person in the ER. She had, in fact, become a different person there. She was a tectonic recreation that was unrecognizable even to her own mother, an evolution wrought in months rather than millennia – sixty-six months, if she was going to be precise – that had begun in her first rotation and culminated during her first July night as an attending physician. In the midst of the ER madness – the light and the sound (and there were just so many sounds, the human and the mechanical, the dying and the wounded and the supportive and the scared) that she morphed into an adrenaline junkie. She was no longer a shy soul that balked at attention, a girl as wary of kindness as shelter cats with torn ears that even after adopted would shrink into the dark of the closet. She was something bigger, inexorable and unyielding.
There was just so much pain and so much fear and so much incredulity in the ER. So many tales Alexis heard that began, “It’s a long story” or “It happened so fast” or “You won’t believe it when I tell you” – and so much urgency, that she could forget who she once was. In the ER, there was no chance that she might slip back into the anxiety or the despair or the self-loathing that as a teenager had her using an old-fashioned razor blade or X-Acto knife to cut deep into her thighs. To feel something other than depression or doubt, to be the captain of her own pain. She felt no need to tend to herself when she was tending to people who, at least that moment, were dramatically worse off than she was. Than she ever was (at least on the outside). She was just too busy.
And so it was perhaps fitting that it was in the ER that she met him. Just as fitting was how she met him.
Though he was probably in no danger of dying.
It was a bullet wound, but nothing like the horrors she’d seen bullets inflict in her years in trauma bays and cubicles. The worst (and worst was a high bar when it came to guns and emergency rooms), were the three teenage girls who were shot after school at field hockey practice by a boy (of course) for reasons that would remain forever unfathomable because then he’d gone home and shot himself. He’d used an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and the girls had holes in their abdomens and chests and legs. One of the three was still awake, and just before she was intubated, she begged Alexis to tell her that she wasn’t going to die, her voice so strong that when Alexis murmured, No, no, shhhhh, she believed it. She really did. One of the others had a heart that stopped beating twice as they worked, and so they gave her the paddles, and the child (and she was a child, she was fifteen for fuck’s sake) had lived long enough to die in the OR instead of the ER. Only one of that trio had lived, and when the last of the girls was gone from the room, Alexis had looked at the ER and how everything – everything – was awash in blood. The gloves and the gauze, the bone saw and retractors, the tubes and the tape and the trash cans. The sweatshirts and skirts the girls had been wearing. The white socks. Their cleats. The floor was streaked and splattered, and the team that had striven to save them had left footprints, the soles of their surgical booties sometimes traversing the red veins left on the tile by the wheels of the gurneys.
This was different.
Austin’s bullet wound was different.
He appeared on a Saturday night – Sunday morning technically – and Alexis was very, very good with a needle, a toothed forceps, and a pair of suturing scissors. With the trauma scissors, when she began by cutting away his sleeve. She was also very good with a scalpel (and probably would have been well before medical school), which mattered because the bullet was lodged near the largest bone in his right arm, three inches below the greater tuberosity of the humerus. It was a low velocity wound and had chipped off a piece of the bone, but it hadn’t shattered it. It hadn’t, thank God, ripped a hole in the brachial artery, which might have caused him to bleed out in the bar, and it hadn’t shredded his rotator cuff, which might have crippled him for life. He was in pain, but not so much that he couldn’t laugh at the fact he had only been in a dive bar in the East Village because he’d left a party and his Uber app had said the nearest vehicle was twenty minutes away. So, on a lark, he’d gone into the bar to watch a couple of guys throwing darts. His smile was ironic and crooked, but far more boyish than rakish. He’d been drinking, and that certainly ameliorated the pain, too, his eyes a little more narrow than she would come to know them, but still open enough that she could see instantly the intangible spark and the tangible green. The muscles in his jaw would tense and untense as she worked, his breath beery, as he grimaced like the men at the gym who would lie on a bench and press three-hundred pounds up off their chests. He had what she would eventually come to learn was a biker’s body: slender but a strong, solid core, and legs that were unexpectedly muscled. His hair was black-coffee dark. He and another dart player had taken a cab the twenty blocks north on First Avenue to the hospital – where, of all things, it would turn out, he worked, too. The two of them hadn’t waited for an ambulance, and they hadn’t waited for the cops. The guy who’d fired the shot? Some crazy junkie, homeless they presumed, who had run from the bar like a madman – no, he was a madman – when he realized that he’d actually discharged his crappy little handgun. Some ridiculous Remington pocket pistol.
“What do you do here?” she asked as she treated him. “At the hospital?”
And he told her. He told her that he worked directly for the hospital’s chief development officer. He raised money. He worked with the folks who managed the hospital’s money. They laughed about meeting here rather than, say, in the hospital cafeteria or along the promenade along the East River as she removed the bullet and stitched him up, and then as they sat in the ER cubicle behind the thick blue drapes and waited for the police to arrive so he could tell them what happened. He guessed that they were probably still at the bar interviewing the bartenders and anyone willing to stick around after someone had nearly killed some yuppie dart player at one in the morning. She asked him about the Band-Aids on the fingers on his left hand. He admitted – sheepishly – that he’d been bitten by a cat the day before. It had been in some woman’s lap in the bakery where he was getting a scone and a cup of coffee, and he startled it when he went to pet it as he was leaving.
“Flirting with the woman?” she’d asked him, which was, in truth, flirting itself.
“Nope. Just surprised to see a cat. The animal was sitting up in one of those cat carriers.”
She insisted on removing the three bandages, none very big, and was startled by how deep and ugly the cuts were. She disinfected them and they talked about rabies, and he was clear and he was adamant: the cat was fine. (And clearly the cat was fine, because it had been nearly seven months ago now that he had taken a cab that night to the hospital. If that cat had had rabies, he would have been long dead.) Still, she’d cleaned the wounds herself, applied an antibiotic ointment, and added a prescription for Augmentin. Meanwhile, his new friend (acquaintance, really) had sat outside in the bright lights of the ER waiting room, stewing, and seemed far more annoyed than scared that there was a guy in a cubicle with a bullet in his biceps.
She had tended to other patients as they waited for the police, pulling on and off the latex gloves, including a little boy with a fever whose mother was terrified (needlessly, it would turn out, when they looked at the blood work) and a deli man who’d snipped off a sizable chunk of his finger with a meat slicer – he was turning tongue into cold cuts – but hadn’t nicked bone and needed only stitches and antibiotics. Nothing very hard and nothing very stressful. No X-rays and no CT scan. For a Saturday night, there weren’t all that many to-be-seen clipboards hanging on pegs on the wall, there weren’t scads of bodies, some stoic and some whimpering, waiting on stretchers like supplicants before royalty.
Looking back on their first moments together, it wasn’t exactly a “meet cute,” but they knew if their relationship lasted until old age, it would be one hell of a good story for their grandchildren.
It's the weekend and, just maybe, your life has slowed down a tad.
If that's the case, here's a little reading that I hope with all my heart you enjoy: the prologue to my March 17 thriller, THE RED LOTUS.
Fingers crossed my work never disappoints any of you.
All the best,
Chris B.
********
Prologue
by Chris Bohjalian
The opposite of a hospice? Not a maternity ward or a NICU. It’s a trick question.
The correct answer? An emergency room. In a hospice, you do everything you can to allow people to die. In the ER? You do all that you can to keep them alive.
It was why she loved the ER, especially the night shift in the city. The relentlessness. The frenetic drive to keep a heart beating or to get someone breathing. Oh, sometimes you lost. You called it. You declared the suicide or the stroke victim or the accidental overdose dead. But far more often you won. Or, at least, you won long enough to get the patient into the OR or into a room upstairs, you won long enough that whatever happened to the man or woman or child or toddler or (dear God) baby was someone else’s problem. And so she became a different person in the ER. She had, in fact, become a different person there. She was a tectonic recreation that was unrecognizable even to her own mother, an evolution wrought in months rather than millennia – sixty-six months, if she was going to be precise – that had begun in her first rotation and culminated during her first July night as an attending physician. In the midst of the ER madness – the light and the sound (and there were just so many sounds, the human and the mechanical, the dying and the wounded and the supportive and the scared) that she morphed into an adrenaline junkie. She was no longer a shy soul that balked at attention, a girl as wary of kindness as shelter cats with torn ears that even after adopted would shrink into the dark of the closet. She was something bigger, inexorable and unyielding.
There was just so much pain and so much fear and so much incredulity in the ER. So many tales Alexis heard that began, “It’s a long story” or “It happened so fast” or “You won’t believe it when I tell you” – and so much urgency, that she could forget who she once was. In the ER, there was no chance that she might slip back into the anxiety or the despair or the self-loathing that as a teenager had her using an old-fashioned razor blade or X-Acto knife to cut deep into her thighs. To feel something other than depression or doubt, to be the captain of her own pain. She felt no need to tend to herself when she was tending to people who, at least that moment, were dramatically worse off than she was. Than she ever was (at least on the outside). She was just too busy.
And so it was perhaps fitting that it was in the ER that she met him. Just as fitting was how she met him.
Though he was probably in no danger of dying.
It was a bullet wound, but nothing like the horrors she’d seen bullets inflict in her years in trauma bays and cubicles. The worst (and worst was a high bar when it came to guns and emergency rooms), were the three teenage girls who were shot after school at field hockey practice by a boy (of course) for reasons that would remain forever unfathomable because then he’d gone home and shot himself. He’d used an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and the girls had holes in their abdomens and chests and legs. One of the three was still awake, and just before she was intubated, she begged Alexis to tell her that she wasn’t going to die, her voice so strong that when Alexis murmured, No, no, shhhhh, she believed it. She really did. One of the others had a heart that stopped beating twice as they worked, and so they gave her the paddles, and the child (and she was a child, she was fifteen for fuck’s sake) had lived long enough to die in the OR instead of the ER. Only one of that trio had lived, and when the last of the girls was gone from the room, Alexis had looked at the ER and how everything – everything – was awash in blood. The gloves and the gauze, the bone saw and retractors, the tubes and the tape and the trash cans. The sweatshirts and skirts the girls had been wearing. The white socks. Their cleats. The floor was streaked and splattered, and the team that had striven to save them had left footprints, the soles of their surgical booties sometimes traversing the red veins left on the tile by the wheels of the gurneys.
This was different.
Austin’s bullet wound was different.
He appeared on a Saturday night – Sunday morning technically – and Alexis was very, very good with a needle, a toothed forceps, and a pair of suturing scissors. With the trauma scissors, when she began by cutting away his sleeve. She was also very good with a scalpel (and probably would have been well before medical school), which mattered because the bullet was lodged near the largest bone in his right arm, three inches below the greater tuberosity of the humerus. It was a low velocity wound and had chipped off a piece of the bone, but it hadn’t shattered it. It hadn’t, thank God, ripped a hole in the brachial artery, which might have caused him to bleed out in the bar, and it hadn’t shredded his rotator cuff, which might have crippled him for life. He was in pain, but not so much that he couldn’t laugh at the fact he had only been in a dive bar in the East Village because he’d left a party and his Uber app had said the nearest vehicle was twenty minutes away. So, on a lark, he’d gone into the bar to watch a couple of guys throwing darts. His smile was ironic and crooked, but far more boyish than rakish. He’d been drinking, and that certainly ameliorated the pain, too, his eyes a little more narrow than she would come to know them, but still open enough that she could see instantly the intangible spark and the tangible green. The muscles in his jaw would tense and untense as she worked, his breath beery, as he grimaced like the men at the gym who would lie on a bench and press three-hundred pounds up off their chests. He had what she would eventually come to learn was a biker’s body: slender but a strong, solid core, and legs that were unexpectedly muscled. His hair was black-coffee dark. He and another dart player had taken a cab the twenty blocks north on First Avenue to the hospital – where, of all things, it would turn out, he worked, too. The two of them hadn’t waited for an ambulance, and they hadn’t waited for the cops. The guy who’d fired the shot? Some crazy junkie, homeless they presumed, who had run from the bar like a madman – no, he was a madman – when he realized that he’d actually discharged his crappy little handgun. Some ridiculous Remington pocket pistol.
“What do you do here?” she asked as she treated him. “At the hospital?”
And he told her. He told her that he worked directly for the hospital’s chief development officer. He raised money. He worked with the folks who managed the hospital’s money. They laughed about meeting here rather than, say, in the hospital cafeteria or along the promenade along the East River as she removed the bullet and stitched him up, and then as they sat in the ER cubicle behind the thick blue drapes and waited for the police to arrive so he could tell them what happened. He guessed that they were probably still at the bar interviewing the bartenders and anyone willing to stick around after someone had nearly killed some yuppie dart player at one in the morning. She asked him about the Band-Aids on the fingers on his left hand. He admitted – sheepishly – that he’d been bitten by a cat the day before. It had been in some woman’s lap in the bakery where he was getting a scone and a cup of coffee, and he startled it when he went to pet it as he was leaving.
“Flirting with the woman?” she’d asked him, which was, in truth, flirting itself.
“Nope. Just surprised to see a cat. The animal was sitting up in one of those cat carriers.”
She insisted on removing the three bandages, none very big, and was startled by how deep and ugly the cuts were. She disinfected them and they talked about rabies, and he was clear and he was adamant: the cat was fine. (And clearly the cat was fine, because it had been nearly seven months ago now that he had taken a cab that night to the hospital. If that cat had had rabies, he would have been long dead.) Still, she’d cleaned the wounds herself, applied an antibiotic ointment, and added a prescription for Augmentin. Meanwhile, his new friend (acquaintance, really) had sat outside in the bright lights of the ER waiting room, stewing, and seemed far more annoyed than scared that there was a guy in a cubicle with a bullet in his biceps.
She had tended to other patients as they waited for the police, pulling on and off the latex gloves, including a little boy with a fever whose mother was terrified (needlessly, it would turn out, when they looked at the blood work) and a deli man who’d snipped off a sizable chunk of his finger with a meat slicer – he was turning tongue into cold cuts – but hadn’t nicked bone and needed only stitches and antibiotics. Nothing very hard and nothing very stressful. No X-rays and no CT scan. For a Saturday night, there weren’t all that many to-be-seen clipboards hanging on pegs on the wall, there weren’t scads of bodies, some stoic and some whimpering, waiting on stretchers like supplicants before royalty.
Looking back on their first moments together, it wasn’t exactly a “meet cute,” but they knew if their relationship lasted until old age, it would be one hell of a good story for their grandchildren.
January 20, 2020
You just looked around, and they were gone
This is the time of the year when we are most likely to hear “Abraham, Martin and John” on the radio. You know the song. It was a hit for Dion in 1968. It’s an homage to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John and Robert Kennedy. It’s wistful, elegiac, and perhaps a little saccharine. It has a harp.
We all, if we are a certain age, can ad-lib the lyrics pretty well, because the verses are nearly identical except for the names:
“Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good they die young.
You know, I just looked around and he’s gone.”
There are verses for each of the four assassinated men. Three white, one black. Two brothers. Two killed within a three-month span in the first half of 1968.
When I heard the song on Sirius radio the other day, the deejay shared two pieces of trivia about its history, one surprising and one tragic. The surprising? The song was written by Dick Holler, the same songwriter who gave us the novelty fluff classic, “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.” The tragic? According to the deejay, the song was written after King was murdered in April, but before Bobby Kennedy would be murdered in June. The verse with Bobby was not part of the original composition (hence the title, “Abraham, Martin, and John”). It was, the deejay explained, added just before Dion went into the studio that summer. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s a little wrenching to consider.
I am, of course, reminding you of the song because today is the day when we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The nation once more will pause to mourn, to remember, and to look back on the life and accomplishments of the clergyman and civil rights leader who quite literally helped change the face of America.
Whenever I am on a book tour in Memphis, I take time out to visit the National Civil Rights Museum. It’s built on the site of the Lorraine Motel where King was assassinated, and visitors can see the balcony where he was standing when he was killed. We can see Room 306, where he was staying. There is, obviously, a lot more. The museum offers a powerful history of the civil rights struggle in the United States.
If I ever needed a history lesson of why we needed King – and why we need him still – I got that reminder the first time I went to the museum. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, the sky cerulean, and I asked the concierge at the hotel where I was staying the best way to get to the museum. He put me in a cab and I was driven. . .less than a mile. Not kidding.
I walked back to the hotel after I toured the museum and asked the concierge, “Wow, do I look that old and infirm that you thought I needed a cab?”
He looked concerned. “Not at all,” he said. “But the neighborhood can be a little. . .sketchy.”
That’s when I got it. I understood the subtext. The concierge was white.
I told him I was appalled. He told me he had to look out for the safety of his guests.
When you hear Dion’s song today – and there really is a chance you will – try not to get lost in the repeated verses. Listen for what is, in my opinion, its best lyric, powerful because you only hear it once:
“Didn’t you love the things that they stood for?”
Indeed. That’s why we take a moment tomorrow to honor Dr. King: It’s not merely what he accomplished. It’s what, even decades after his death, he stands for.
*. *. *. *.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on January 19, 2014. Chris’s new novel, “The Red Lotus” will be published in March. His first play, “Midwives,” opens this week at the George Street Playhouse)
We all, if we are a certain age, can ad-lib the lyrics pretty well, because the verses are nearly identical except for the names:
“Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good they die young.
You know, I just looked around and he’s gone.”
There are verses for each of the four assassinated men. Three white, one black. Two brothers. Two killed within a three-month span in the first half of 1968.
When I heard the song on Sirius radio the other day, the deejay shared two pieces of trivia about its history, one surprising and one tragic. The surprising? The song was written by Dick Holler, the same songwriter who gave us the novelty fluff classic, “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.” The tragic? According to the deejay, the song was written after King was murdered in April, but before Bobby Kennedy would be murdered in June. The verse with Bobby was not part of the original composition (hence the title, “Abraham, Martin, and John”). It was, the deejay explained, added just before Dion went into the studio that summer. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s a little wrenching to consider.
I am, of course, reminding you of the song because today is the day when we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The nation once more will pause to mourn, to remember, and to look back on the life and accomplishments of the clergyman and civil rights leader who quite literally helped change the face of America.
Whenever I am on a book tour in Memphis, I take time out to visit the National Civil Rights Museum. It’s built on the site of the Lorraine Motel where King was assassinated, and visitors can see the balcony where he was standing when he was killed. We can see Room 306, where he was staying. There is, obviously, a lot more. The museum offers a powerful history of the civil rights struggle in the United States.
If I ever needed a history lesson of why we needed King – and why we need him still – I got that reminder the first time I went to the museum. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, the sky cerulean, and I asked the concierge at the hotel where I was staying the best way to get to the museum. He put me in a cab and I was driven. . .less than a mile. Not kidding.
I walked back to the hotel after I toured the museum and asked the concierge, “Wow, do I look that old and infirm that you thought I needed a cab?”
He looked concerned. “Not at all,” he said. “But the neighborhood can be a little. . .sketchy.”
That’s when I got it. I understood the subtext. The concierge was white.
I told him I was appalled. He told me he had to look out for the safety of his guests.
When you hear Dion’s song today – and there really is a chance you will – try not to get lost in the repeated verses. Listen for what is, in my opinion, its best lyric, powerful because you only hear it once:
“Didn’t you love the things that they stood for?”
Indeed. That’s why we take a moment tomorrow to honor Dr. King: It’s not merely what he accomplished. It’s what, even decades after his death, he stands for.
*. *. *. *.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on January 19, 2014. Chris’s new novel, “The Red Lotus” will be published in March. His first play, “Midwives,” opens this week at the George Street Playhouse)
