April 15-28, 2008

Here is the heart of "The Resurrectionist" by Jack O'Connell (page references are to the Algonquin hardbound edition):

"...he understood that the universe, the fabric of reality, was composed of nothing more than particles of longing, a kind of quantum desire for absolute connection. Dr. Peck understood that, from moment to moment, we are profoundly asleep and, so, profoundly alone. ...He knew that every arousal he achieved would bring him closer to answers that had more to do with the nature of consciousness than of coma." (143)

"...this was what he lived for: that instant of pure, galloping potential, that feeling of downrushing epiphany. ...But calling forth fresh thought was, like summoning demons, a precarious process. And, for Dr. Peck, it required an instinctual blending of the right amounts of whimsy, research, fatigue, daydream, alcohol, and stress. It also required the right environment.... Finally, the summoning required a marriage of humility and patience that could allow the idea to reveal itself in its own manner and time. The idea, it must be understood, is always in charge." (145-146)

"...the calling to medicine -- at least the kind of visionary medicine to which he aspired -- was more than a vocation; it was destiny. And as such, it called for a radical lifestyle. Doctors, like monks, were forever at risk of infiltration by the domestic world. He concluded... that they should be solitary, if not entirely celibate, creatures. ...set apart." (146-147)

As in his earlier work, "Word Made Flesh," O'Connell has staked his claim on the phenomenon of creativity and developed a glossus of images to convey his theories and exasperations. He begins Word with the closely observed vivisection of a man, a reverse process of the title, in which we watch a mind (such as it was), and instincts and feelings (such as they were) deftly divested of their mortal envelope, their "jacket" of flesh. From there, somehow, inexorably and beautifully, we are led to apples, and you know what they stand for.

In "The Resurrectionist," we're given a boy in a coma, his grieving father whose wife -- the boy's mother -- died six months after the boy's "incident." We're given a creepy private hospital in O'Connell's perturbingly passé Quinsigamond (Worcester), Massachusetts, said hospital staffed by incestuous strangers in a suffocating atmosphere of endless waiting.

Time is made of glass here. There's motion, but it takes years to make a single ripple. It might all be a metaphor for the giant brain we famously use only ten percent of, a brain that is "from moment to moment... profoundly asleep and, so, profoundly alone."

The chief creep, Dr. Peck, is chasing "arousal" of his comatose patients, seeking that one brilliant insight -- his own arousal -- like a deep-sea diver in the murk of our still primitive sciences of mind and thought. O'Connell's work is rich with wry and mordant humor, and he has his questing doctor literally using a diver's torch to examine the film of the sleeping boy's brain.

Interleaved with all this are slices of a comic-book saga, Limbo, that frames out into a sort of Carnivàle with a twisted trot (i.e., student guide), linking the Limbo circus freaks to the characters at the Peck Clinic. It works because of two qualities in Mr. O'Connell's fiction.

There is the sort of honesty that seems larger than the work that contains it, as if it were a billowing mantle or a prophetic migraine, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear Mr. O'Connell borrow Stravinsky's famous line about being the "vessel through which [these stories] passed."

(Since I wrote these words, I heard Mr. O'Connell speak about the creative process, and he said it's both craft and inspiration, hard work and mystical, galvanizing energy.)

The second quality is the emotional and psychologica

I guess if I went into this book expecting Kafka, Eco or Chabon I was setting myself up to be disappointed.

A good gothic effort, O'Connell took a large risk writing a medical thriller that attempts to be more interesting than a simple Robin Cook medical whodunit.

If 5 stars were Kafka, 4 stars were Pynchon/Chabon/Eco, I'd give this book 3.5 stars for aim and execution. Not perfect or timeless, but definitely working for a longer tail than most easy to categorize novels out there. I'd rather read a novel that aims for the back of the moon, than a pot boiler that settles for easy escapism.

O'Connell's work deserves more attention, so I guess that puts him in good company.

For those readers who appreciate fine writing and wholly unique, original stories, Jack O'Connell's novels are the literary equivalent of oxygen.

With four excellent novels previous to THE RESURRECTIONIST, it baffles me that O'Connell is not a steady fixture on the bestseller list. His plots operate on a multitude of levels: if you're looking for a fast-paced, provoking thriller O'Connell is your guy; if you want to read a complex yarn replete with unexpected twists and turns and complexities he's very much your guy; if your cup of tea is thrillers that must come mixed with intelligence O'Connell always delivers.

O'Connell puts masters like Lehane, Connelly, and Crais to shame.

With THE RESURRECTIONIST, O'Connell has surpassed his own standard of excellence, and given us a mesmerizing, impossible-to-put-down novel that transcends reality and redefines noir.

Simply put, the book tells the story of a father and son newly arrived at the forbidding Peck Clinic, a neurology institute that seems designed in part by CIA mind control geeks and renegade physicians bent on rewriting the mind's secret codes. Danny, the son, a coma victim, is locked in a world all his own; his father, Sweeney, a pharmacist, wants Danny to return to his conscious state. But Danny dwells in Limbo, a comic book-like place peopled with enough rare and bizarre characters to rival Katherine Dunn's GEEK LOVE. With psychotic bikers circling the story like blood hungry vultures and vivacious neurologists tempting Sweeney, THE RESURRECTIONIST is like no other book I can think of--- O'Connell has handed us another modern masterpiece of suspense and intelligence. Read this book as quickly as you can get your hands on a copy!

WOW! What a book. I read this is less then 24 hours. I could not put it down. I was hook by the first chapter and the rest was history. The pace of the book was fast and the dialouge kept me intrigued. From Sweeney and Danny to the Cirus freaks you enter a world like one you have never seen yet by the end you realize maybe its not so different then your own! A must read, I only hope there is a sequel....