488
PARTISAN REVIEW
the
m~edical
staff, complacently married for years to a rich paragon with
perfect taste, falls in love with his lovely patient.
In
the nick of time, this
doctor stays the knife of an overeager surgeon who might have done Ivy
irreparable harm, and as she begins to recover, the infatuated chief of
medicine has some highly indiscreet sex with her. Alta Buena rocks when
the scandal breaks open.
What saves all of this - up to a point - from sounding uncomfort–
ably reminiscent of
General Hospital
and
St. Elsewhere
is Diane Johnson's
drily ironic view of the hierarchical structure of a hospital, and her sar–
donic deflation of the pomposity and overweening self-importance of
those who make its life-and-death decisions: "All the doctors, but espe–
cially the women, were festooned with stethoscopes slung around their
necks, and beepers, to avoid being taken for nurses." At her best, she as–
tutely evokes the way a hospital becomes a world unto itself, discon–
nected from both the normality and abnormality of life outside, encased
in its struggle to outwit death, to defY the unpredictable assaults of the
body on itself.
Yet her characters, medical and laymen, fail to develop with suffi–
cient depth or credibility. When Ivy, fully recovered, decides to turn her
life around, she is seized by the idea of becoming not only a doctor but
a surgeon. Given what we've learned about her, it seems a pathetic
inspiration. For one thing, she finds herself saddled with a $48,000
hospital bill that will take years to payoff. There's also the fatherless in–
fant to complicate matters, and Ivy's lack of any qualification for medical
school. Yet despite these huge stumbling blocks, "the more [Ivy] thought
about medicine, the more plausible, the more inevitable, it seemed....
An emotion like religious conversion, like spiritual rededication, burned
across her forehead like the wimple of a nun. She wanted
to
be a
doctor." It's completely unclear how Johnson means us to take this
delirious inspiration. If it's intended as a sign of Ivy's posthospital
weakness, it's unconvincing.
If
Johnson wants to persuade us that the
young woman's dream is not beyond the bounds of possibility, her
meaning remains ambiguous.
More wry than genuinely comic in its depiction of this medical
world, neither does
Health and Happiness
affect us strongly enough when
Johnson turns to the pain and humiliation of illness, the inexorability of
death. This is an unreflective novel about a subject that cries out for
much more than a superficial episodic cross-section of hospital life laced
with ironic detachment. This is not to say that every novel about illness
must climb the magic mountain. But a patchy mosaic of half a dozen
briskly drawn portraits and plots is too glib to arouse our intense re–
sponse to the frightening fragility of health, and the way sick people be–
come enslaved by their suffering. What this "comedy" about a hospital
