What do you think?
Rate this book
The Viewing Room: Stories
In The Viewing Room , two hospital chaplains console the living during the moments when they look upon their beloved dead for one last time in a large urban hospital in Los Angeles. But this room is also a character, linking stories together and bearing witness in chilling testimony of grief and wisdom. Henrietta and Maurice, the chaplains, are ministers who have lost their faith due to devastating personal tragedy. Still, they regain their hold on their own lives through their work, one death at a time.
Jacquelin Gorman lays bare nine parallel worlds of suffering in stories of unflinching detail, vividly told with heart, guts, and compassion. In these pages, the children are both murderers and victims, and the adults fare no a teenage father shakes his screaming baby to death; high school surfers kill the homeless for sport as a way of cleaning up their beaches; a Muslim basketball player readies her best friend for burial with a sacred ritual that reveals forbidden love; a scorned ex-wife leaves a message in permanent ink on the body of her betrayer; and a pet therapy dog’s unconditional love for a decaying body memorializes the spirit within.
This moving and unsettling collection of stories shines a piercing light on the dark corners of our modern world, illuminating necessary truths that convey a clearer and, undoubtedly, greater vision of humanity.
Jacquelin Gorman lays bare nine parallel worlds of suffering in stories of unflinching detail, vividly told with heart, guts, and compassion. In these pages, the children are both murderers and victims, and the adults fare no a teenage father shakes his screaming baby to death; high school surfers kill the homeless for sport as a way of cleaning up their beaches; a Muslim basketball player readies her best friend for burial with a sacred ritual that reveals forbidden love; a scorned ex-wife leaves a message in permanent ink on the body of her betrayer; and a pet therapy dog’s unconditional love for a decaying body memorializes the spirit within.
This moving and unsettling collection of stories shines a piercing light on the dark corners of our modern world, illuminating necessary truths that convey a clearer and, undoubtedly, greater vision of humanity.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
152 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
5 people are currently reading
91 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 4, 2013
I read this in one sitting. I could not put it down. Told in interconnecting short stories, these are glimpses into the basic processes of death and grieving and continuing to live, and finding faith. How basic and complicated they are. The prose is lush, and the characters well-developed. I don't usually like short stories but these were exquisite.
July 30, 2024
This book is wild. I really liked the story telling style, and how all the stories told flow together. I think it's a vital one for anyone interested in chaplaincy to read, and an important one for anyone in a helping profession to read.
I go back and forth on whether I think it would have benefited from trigger warnings. Could have benefited because some of the chapters are very intense. But maybe benefited from not having them because that's faithful to the experience of a chaplain--you don't know what you're walking into until you experience it.
Grateful to have read it, even though it's fictional and I didn't really like the two chaplain characters in some ways.
I go back and forth on whether I think it would have benefited from trigger warnings. Could have benefited because some of the chapters are very intense. But maybe benefited from not having them because that's faithful to the experience of a chaplain--you don't know what you're walking into until you experience it.
Grateful to have read it, even though it's fictional and I didn't really like the two chaplain characters in some ways.
January 1, 2016
Gormand's The Viewing Room is a short story cycle, a form of which I have long been a fan, but the stories here seem so well tied together, the collection so well conceived of as a whole, that the work seems in some ways more like a modernist novel than like a cycle. In that sense, this work fails, on conventional levels, to excel either as a novel (where pieces come together to forge a plot that pulls readers from one chapter to the next) or as a collection of stories (where each piece provides an emotional and narrative payoff). Rather, this work is something that is assured in a different sense. Each sentence is put together with utmost care, and the picture that emerges of the characters and place in disparate pieces seems of a whole.
The book as a whole follows the lives of chaplins who work in a hospital viewing room, where loved ones are placed on display just before and after death. More specifically, the book largely focuses on one chaplin in particular, a woman named Henrietta who has lost her mother and brother and who, incapable of any longer serving as a minister to a congregation, takes a job in the hospital. There, she discovers she's not entirely up to the process of helping others grieve either. Other stories feature another chaplain at the hospital named Maurice, whose questioning of his faith and his desire to revenge his mother's death, disqualify him from serving as a minister and relegate him to the hospital for work.
Each story focuses on a particular incident, with each tale told in more or less chronological order from the time Henrietta starts her job at the hospital to the time a year later when she leaves the job. In the first, she is suckered in to baptizing a dead infant for a Catholic mother whose boyfriend has come separately to see the child and whose dark secret is just the beginning of the horror Henrietta will constantly face at the hospital.
One of the previously published stories of Gorman's Viewing Room collection, “Ghost Dance,” focuses on a diabetic woman whose family has all died off and who has become a much-loved patient at the hospital. Here, the chaplain Henrietta faces something she knew she would eventually have to deal with and never wanted to face: serving as chaplain for one of her friends at their death.
In “Having Words” Maurice faces a similar situation, when one of his suicide hotline callers shows up in the viewing room. “Staggered Departures” is a bit of a departure from the rest of the collection in that it focuses not on the chaplains themselves but on one of the hospital goers facing the death of a loved one, in this case a sensitive son and his older and more worldly sister dealing with the death of their minister mother. In “The Problem Outside” Henrietta goes to a movie theater to take her mind off her job and is confronted again with death--outside--in the form of an emergency just outside the movie theater for which hospital personnel are asked to intervene. The nurse who shows up in this story plays a role in another story, “Permanent Makeup,” about Halloween and mourning groups and how a mother deals with groups who won't accept her because her experience doesn't fit neatly into a single camp (suicide, accident, disease).
“Blood Rules,” another standalone story from Gorman's The Viewing Room, recounts how chaplains deal with the mourning customs of differing faiths, in this case, Islamic. Faced with not having a woman to do perform the necessary deeds for a dead girl, the chaplains come up with a unique plan to officiate.
In “Passerby” Henrietta faces yet another task that she has long dreaded as a hospital chaplain--entering the viewing room to find a dear friend laid out in it. This time, the person is Ellie, an older lady who has rather longed for death but whose death is still a shock to the chaplain, given that it happened while Ellie was out for a walk. She was found by a homeless man who, as it turns out, actually had a small role in that death. But in the process of learning his story, Henrietta comes to see that she is not the only one grieving.
The collection ends with “Safe Surrender,” a piece, conveniently enough, about rebirth or birth or what you will, as a healthy baby is found abandoned in the viewing room, and the chaplains go about finding it a new home.
The book as a whole follows the lives of chaplins who work in a hospital viewing room, where loved ones are placed on display just before and after death. More specifically, the book largely focuses on one chaplin in particular, a woman named Henrietta who has lost her mother and brother and who, incapable of any longer serving as a minister to a congregation, takes a job in the hospital. There, she discovers she's not entirely up to the process of helping others grieve either. Other stories feature another chaplain at the hospital named Maurice, whose questioning of his faith and his desire to revenge his mother's death, disqualify him from serving as a minister and relegate him to the hospital for work.
Each story focuses on a particular incident, with each tale told in more or less chronological order from the time Henrietta starts her job at the hospital to the time a year later when she leaves the job. In the first, she is suckered in to baptizing a dead infant for a Catholic mother whose boyfriend has come separately to see the child and whose dark secret is just the beginning of the horror Henrietta will constantly face at the hospital.
One of the previously published stories of Gorman's Viewing Room collection, “Ghost Dance,” focuses on a diabetic woman whose family has all died off and who has become a much-loved patient at the hospital. Here, the chaplain Henrietta faces something she knew she would eventually have to deal with and never wanted to face: serving as chaplain for one of her friends at their death.
In “Having Words” Maurice faces a similar situation, when one of his suicide hotline callers shows up in the viewing room. “Staggered Departures” is a bit of a departure from the rest of the collection in that it focuses not on the chaplains themselves but on one of the hospital goers facing the death of a loved one, in this case a sensitive son and his older and more worldly sister dealing with the death of their minister mother. In “The Problem Outside” Henrietta goes to a movie theater to take her mind off her job and is confronted again with death--outside--in the form of an emergency just outside the movie theater for which hospital personnel are asked to intervene. The nurse who shows up in this story plays a role in another story, “Permanent Makeup,” about Halloween and mourning groups and how a mother deals with groups who won't accept her because her experience doesn't fit neatly into a single camp (suicide, accident, disease).
“Blood Rules,” another standalone story from Gorman's The Viewing Room, recounts how chaplains deal with the mourning customs of differing faiths, in this case, Islamic. Faced with not having a woman to do perform the necessary deeds for a dead girl, the chaplains come up with a unique plan to officiate.
In “Passerby” Henrietta faces yet another task that she has long dreaded as a hospital chaplain--entering the viewing room to find a dear friend laid out in it. This time, the person is Ellie, an older lady who has rather longed for death but whose death is still a shock to the chaplain, given that it happened while Ellie was out for a walk. She was found by a homeless man who, as it turns out, actually had a small role in that death. But in the process of learning his story, Henrietta comes to see that she is not the only one grieving.
The collection ends with “Safe Surrender,” a piece, conveniently enough, about rebirth or birth or what you will, as a healthy baby is found abandoned in the viewing room, and the chaplains go about finding it a new home.
July 29, 2016
This is a collection of short stories that won the Flannery O'Connor award, and appropriately so. The writing is beautiful and the stories will stay with you much longer than you anticipate. In between each story, there's a short essay-style section from the POV of the actual Viewing Room - the room in the hospital where loved ones view the body and say goodbye. These sections are quite insightful and lovely, and for me, acted as a bridge that strengthened me. The stories provide the reader with that insider's view of death and the dying, born from the author's experiences as a hospital chaplain. But for me, these stories are on my must-read list, because they do what good fiction is supposed to do -- they increase your capacity for empathy.
It may be a lot to take these stories cover-to-cover. They're dense. Weighty. Read one, let it sink in, and try another one. It will be worth it.
It may be a lot to take these stories cover-to-cover. They're dense. Weighty. Read one, let it sink in, and try another one. It will be worth it.
August 2, 2017
Kind of tough and depressing to get through - and I say this as someone who can handle books with heavy topics. I made it through the first two stories - the first about an infant with shaken baby syndrome and the second about a woman with a flesh-eating illness - until the third story about a 10 year old girl's suicide that did me in. We all have things we can't handle and that's my personal tolerance threshold, right there.
All of these characters have one thing in common: they all wind up in the viewing room of the hospital where Henrietta is the on-call chaplain. This is as much Henrietta's story as those who are dead. She's unsure of herself (at least in the first 30 pages) and we get the sense she isn't quite living her life as much as she should be. There's a holding back, of sorts.
It's a good concept and the writing is okay, but this one just wasn't for me.
All of these characters have one thing in common: they all wind up in the viewing room of the hospital where Henrietta is the on-call chaplain. This is as much Henrietta's story as those who are dead. She's unsure of herself (at least in the first 30 pages) and we get the sense she isn't quite living her life as much as she should be. There's a holding back, of sorts.
It's a good concept and the writing is okay, but this one just wasn't for me.
August 14, 2013
An absolute "must-read"! Insightful, moving, deeply engaging look at death and dying and family response from the viewpoint of Henrietta, a young hospital chaplain facing the myriad of circumstances surrounding death as it happens in a critical care hospital. The author brings you into her world with stark honesty and sometimes painful intensity, but with an equal portion of joy and human warmth. This winner of the University of Georgia Press' 2013 national competition for short story compilation deserves to be on everyone's nightstand.
January 5, 2014
Well done. Of course, as the author wisely acknowledges within the text, hospital chaplaincy isn't nearly this poetic. It has its moments, as Maurice voices in the last chapter, but it's even more odd, unfinished, and awkward than depicted here, by a long shot. Still, I'm so selfishly relieved to have some straightforward fiction from which to teach the craft. This is great springboard material for theory, practice, reflection, etc.
People ask me all the time, What exactly does a chaplain DO? And I might recommend this book as an intro point, with the caveats above.
People ask me all the time, What exactly does a chaplain DO? And I might recommend this book as an intro point, with the caveats above.
August 30, 2019
2012 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
November 13, 2013
Quite possibly the worst book I've ever finished. :(
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews