In sickness and in health

So what do you like to read when you’re sick? I had the misfortune to be in hospital for kidney stones this week (a discreet veil will be drawn over the symptoms, the procedure I endured and the aftermath: a thousand glasses of water a day – I don’t really want to scare the squeamish). So because it was a bit of an emergency admission, I grabbed the first book on my bedside table that I could see, one that I hadn’t read yet. It’s Exit Ghost by Philip Roth.

What’s really ghostly is the urological synchronicity of the book and my recent experience. The novel starts off with the protagonist, an elderly writer (which is kind of how I’m feeling right now), battling incontinence as the result of the removal of his cancerous prostate, and he’s in New York to try out a new procedure which may help with the leakage by injecting collagen into the area around the prostate. Now my usual association with collagen is as a filler for lips and frown lines, but a leaking bladder? Not the kind of plastic surgery any of us wants to see for ourselves in our futures. So unglamorous.

But let’s not dwell on this. What I’m really interested in is what works for you when you feel vulnerable. Do you need to be uplifted (a romantic love story), whisked away to another world (a Harry Potter perhaps), or encouraged to have faith in your survival (whether you are surviving a tummy tuck or the removal of a rare growth)?

I think I’m one of the weird ones who likes to read sombre and stark stuff when I’m in hospital. And Philip Roth fits the bill just nicely thank you. His is dry, clear prose: brutally pithy and unselfpitying. It is unsentimental writing, clean and unadorned. There is no false hope here, no greater scheme, no happy ending. I struggle to understand why this kind of writing gives me a perverse sense of comfort. Perhaps it’s that there is a truthfulness to it which I find quite exhilarating because Roth asks us to look into our souls and see what is there, whether we like it or not. And doesn’t illness confront us with these same questions? What does the future hold? Do we have control over what happens to us? Have we done things we regret? Are we ready for death? Does a hospital gown make my arms look puny? Can an enema be erotic?

There’s a wonderful example of Roth’s wry and dispassionate style (he makes irony and distance an art form) when a couple who look out for him in his self imposed rural exile celebrate his seventieth birthday with him. They ask him to say something about reaching this age.

“After donning their sweater, I rose from my chair at the head of the table and said to them, ‘It’ll be a short speech. Think of the year 4000.’ They smiled, as though I were about to crack a joke, and so I added, ‘No, no. Think seriously about 4000. Imagine it. In all its dimensions, in all its aspects. The year 4000. Take your time.’ After a minute of sober silence, I quietly said to them, ‘That’s what it’s like to be seventy,’ and sat back down.”     

Isn’t that fabulous? In the prose equivalent of the deadpan put down he reminds them that not only can he not really explain to them what it’s like to inhabit the otherness of being old, they cannot imagine what seems so distant and unreal. It’s this kind of writing which really cheers me up, paradoxically.

And let me tell you what didn’t cheer me up in hospital was the elderly gent who harangued me with his bible readings and his proselytising. Superficially benign he boasted of how many people he’d “saved” in his week long stay. Alas I was not one of them – what would have saved me was a little more irony, a little less faith, and a designer hospital gown.