PEARL K. BELL
487
without hesitation to harmless inclinations of the flesh."
As Erich's life seeps away, it is not only Jonathan who must face the
brutal truth that the "new age" was anything but harmless. Watching
Erich die, Clare is repelled by the smell of medicine, the grim irreversibil–
ity of "skin turning the color of clay." But far more troubling is her
realization that the home which she and Jonathan and Bobby believed
they could create and sustain cannot succor a child. It is the child who
brings Clare
to
her senses: As Erich is darkened by the shadow of death,
and Jonathan awaits his turn, Clare knows she must take her baby and
£lee: "What would it do to [Rebecca] if her earliest memories revolved
around the decline and eventual disappearance of the people she most
adored?" Clare has finally learned the unappeasable obligations of re–
sponsibility. In prose that is graceful, tender, and powerfully felt, without
a trace of sentimentality, Cunningham skillfully conveys the fragility and
sadness of these disparate voices and hearts, groping for the elusive
consolations of family, home, and love, adrift in a time of moral
dislocation and loss.
Diane Johnson's
Health and Happiness
6
is also about life and death,
but she approaches these grave matters with an altogether different pos–
ture, in writing a comic novel about a hospital. Since it hardly needs
saying that it's difficult to be funny about illness and pain, the principal
object of Johnson's satirical disaffection is not the patients but the doc–
tors, nurses, administrators, and volunteers of Alta Buena, a big and
bustling hospital in San Francisco, with all the squabbles, rivalries, ten–
sions, and goofs that attend its daily rounds.
The author of six previous novels - the best of them is
The Shadow
Knows,
about a young divorcee, struggling to raise four children on her
own, who is spooked by an invisible agent of menace and malice -
Johnson has also written biographies of George Meredith's wife and
Dashiell Hammett. Herself the wife of a doctor, Johnson is familiar with
many aspects of the medical scene, and in
Health and Happiness
she makes
good use of a shrewdly observant eye, a retentive memory, and a knowl–
edgeable command of the technical vocabulary necessary
to
her story.
Mainly that story concerns a beautiful young woman, Ivy Tarro, who is
hospitalized for a minor but mysterious swelling in her arm. The
unmarried mother of an infant daughter, Ivy is the maitre d' of a chic
San Francisco restaurant, and until this crisis she has been untouched by
any serious threats to her health and happiness. But when a careless doc–
tor administers the wrong drug, Ivy sinks into a coma, her very life, let
alone health and happiness, critically endangered. Meanwhile the chief of
6Healrll
alld Happiness.
By Diane Johnson . Alfred A. Knopf. $19.95.
