Even if the personalities of the numerous physicians are not fully rounded, their identities as doctors are. Verghese’s writing about all things medical is particularly adroit his profound understanding of the human body is perhaps his greatest strength. The tone of the book is sometimes pedagogical: There are a lot of doctors here, and we learn in rather fine detail about surgical procedures, anatomical constructions and medical interventions. This is not a novel endowed with subtle psychological insights, and it is devoid of humor: on the part of the characters or about them.
The lack of ill intent or even ambivalence among the book’s many heroes can become cloying. His new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” focuses almost entirely on good people (to whom many terrible things happen), and given the complexity of human beings, the surfeit of grace sometimes feels unrealistic and even pretentious, as though the writer is affiliating himself with standards that ordinary humans cannot attain. The modesty of ostentatiously kindhearted people can come off as smug, and in his public statements, Verghese occasionally assumes a bothersome tone of condescension. It is hard to operate consistently on such high principles, harder still to explain them to others, and hardest of all to demand that others rise to them. By projecting his own best self, he hopes to coax out the best selves of others. In an era when seriousness is often presumed to entail skepticism, he is serious about benevolence. He suffered considerably when he was younger - experiences he has chronicled in his earlier fiction and nonfiction - and emerged a romantic, determined to be kind and extravagantly compassionate, a genuine humanist. It is tempting to look at him as a man with multiple careers running in tandem, but all his work is anchored in a consistent, profound moral architecture of the spirit. His last novel, “Cutting for Stone,” spent more than two years on this newspaper’s best-seller list. He is a professor of the theory and practice of medicine at Stanford Medical School, continues in clinical practice, has won the National Humanities Medal, speaks widely about the importance of the human element of what has become a technocratic practice, and has won awards for both fiction and nonfiction.
A doctor who decided midcareer to train at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has gone on to achieve distinction in both fields. THE COVENANT OF WATER, by Abraham VergheseĪbraham Verghese occupies a curious place in the modern literary landscape.
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