TO THE EDGE
OF THE NEW WORLD.
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This week, McSweeney's releases Chris Adrian's novel The Children's Hospital (on sale here), one of the most remarkable books we have been connected with. We glimpsed its beginnings a couple of years ago, and since then it's grown into a tremendous creation, encompassing dozens of vividly drawn characters, and fulfilling every inch of its monumental ambition—there's more hope and pain here, and more searing thought, than we can really convey on a Web page. You can see what other people have said here ("The Children's Hospital is an epic, the kind of literally immersive work that connects you to the world around you even as it disconnects that world from what we like to think of as consensual reality") and here ("Written with a sense of wit and entirely without pretense, Hospital looks to be the most promising novel to be released since ... Middlesex"). Marilynne Robinson (Gilead, Housekeeping) says, "Chris Adrian's life is a dedicated exploration of the things that matter most, and his writing is his companion and interlocutor, his guide and interpreter, as he travels a landscape not before seen by other eyes. And every report he makes of that world enriches and enlarges our own sense of the world we thought we knew." (Click here for more praise for this book, from Nathan Englander, Emily Barton, and Julie Orringer.)
We're making the first few chapters of The Children's Hospital available as a PDF, and today, below, we bring you a brief conversation with Chris Adrian. The book itself is available here. We're very excited about this one.
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An Interview
With Chris Adrian.
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Q: You finished a medical residency a couple years ago, and now you're in divinity school—and this book is about a holy apocalypse devastating everything except for a hospital. When did that scenario present itself to you, and how much of it comes out of your background? Would we be reading a different book if you'd gone to forestry school instead?
CHRIS ADRIAN: I had kind of a lousy call night one night during my third-year pediatric clerkship in medical school. For some reason the night seemed to be going on forever—I felt like I'd been stuck in the hospital forever and I was going to be stuck there forever. I spent the call wandering around feeling exhausted and useless, and imagining that everybody else, like me, was never going to go home. It was a rainy night, and when I happened to go outside, the hospital, which was sort of castle-shaped, seemed to be floating in a sea of mist and fog and rain.
If I had gone to forestry school, you would be reading about really hot killer dryads.
Q: The typical cast for a post-apocalyptic epic seems to be a handful of rugged survivalists, or maybe isolated mutants. But here you've created a small society—hundreds of patients and doctors and parents, even a tamale lady—and for the most part they're forced to go forward with the lives they had before. So there's a day-to-day realism within a fantastical frame. Was that a conscious balance? Were you ever tempted into Mad Max territory?
ADRIAN: My first writing teacher had a rule that the more fantastical your frame the more ordinary and real had to be the lives that were lived inside it. I felt to a certain extent—sometimes probably to a fault—that I had to proceed very quietly a lot of the time in the narrative, so as not to call attention to the essential battiness of the premise. I didn't want either the readers or the characters to be always looking out the window, so to speak. But I was constantly tempted into Mad Max territory. Though it's never described, I always pictured that the tamale lady gave herself Tina Turner Thunderdome hair at about the same time that everyone else abandons their old-world wardrobes. And there were rampaging zombie nurses who ate a medical student in the last part of the story, but somebody made me get rid of them.
Q: Your last book, Gob's Grief, dealt with a Civil War–era attempt to invent a resurrection machine. In this one, almost everyone's dead from the get-go—we're told that the whole world is under seven miles of water. In a sense, both books take place in the wake of their central dramas. Do you feel like you're writing about aftermaths?
ADRIAN: Um, yes. With Gob it was more of a personal aftermath, and an attempt to sort out a big mess I was in after my brother died ... I wanted to write a story where somebody actually got their brother back. This time I was trying, in some really weird way, to sort out the everyday misery of being an American lately, part of an immensely privileged community in crisis, a community that in many ways sees itself as in some way chosen even as we quietly worry about the ways in which we are (unfavorably) judged. The book started out a lot more like a big happy Love Boat episode, then 9/11 (and all that followed) happened and blew it in a new direction.
Q: You've written other stories that seem like they're set in this same world, or share characters with it: Cindy Flemm and Siri Chandra appeared in Issue No. 14 of our journal, and Chandra was also maybe the narrator of your recent New Yorker story, "A Better Angel." How much time do you spend in that universe?
ADRIAN: I have all sorts of unprofitable daydreams about characters when I should be doing homework or paying attention to where I'm walking. I have a lot in common with Siri Chandra, and whenever I'm feeling really down on myself I write a little story about him getting humiliated in some horrible new way. It's kind of like beating myself with a stick, which can be very gratifying in the right circumstances.
Q: There's an angel narrating some chapters here, and most of the story is told from the point of view of a young woman—you're writing in voices that are pretty unlike your own. Was that a difficult leap?
ADRIAN: In some ways. I was sort of a big girl growing up, so that made some of Jemma's flashbacks easier. The angel stuff—who knows what angels sound like? I figured I could get away with anything in that regard. Trying to give a sense of Jemma's feelings toward her baby was probably the toughest part. I was always tempted to accost pregnant ladies, or get one to pinch-hit here and there for a few sentences.
Q: There's also a lot here about adolescence, about enduring or protesting uncontrollable surroundings at that age. How do you look back on whatever dramas defined your own teenage years?
ADRIAN: I was a miserable, miserable, miserable, miserable, miserable, miserable, miserable, miserable, miserable teenager.
Q: You've mentioned the advice "Write about your obsessions." What are yours? Are they different now from when you began the book?
ADRIAN: They are probably pretty much the same—death and American religious history. And zombies. Oh, and I'm getting this weird crush on Thomas Jefferson. That's new.
Q: You went to Africa to work in an orphanage right after you finished writing this. What was it like to shift your focus that way?
ADRIAN: It was really swell!
MORE ABOUT THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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To the Edge of the New World
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Expanding Earnings Potential on Voicemail Service By Jamie Allen
A Letter to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band From Sgt. Pepper By John Moe
Sean Hannity Takes Care of Business: Another Letter From an Earth Ball By Ben Greenman
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