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Why I love Britain’s socialized healthcare system – Salon, August 22, 2009

In Essays on August 25, 2009 at 1:16 pm

Why I love Britain’s socialized healthcare system

News

Salon/Mignon Khargie

As I learned when my newborn daughter was very sick, in U.K. hospitals, people take care of each other

By Stephen Amidon

Aug. 22, 2009 | My eldest daughter had a rough first week. Born after 22 hours of hard labor, her pink skin proceeded to turn an alarming shade of yellow on the second day of her life. It was a bad case of jaundice. She would need to be placed in an incubator, whose ultraviolet light would hopefully clear up the condition. If not, a transfusion would be required. My exhausted wife and I watched in numb horror as our child was encased in the clear plastic box that was to become her crib for the next seven days. What we had hoped would be a straightforward delivery had turned into a nightmare.

Because I am American, and those endless days and nights were spent in a maternity hospital in London, the week that followed has been very much on my mind as I listen to the recent attacks on the British National Health Service. It is a system that I found to be very different from the one currently being described as “evil” and “Orwellian” by politicians and commentators eager to use it as an example of the dark side of public medicine.

I was initially skeptical about the NHS. I’d grown up comfortably in suburban New Jersey; good private healthcare was always immediately available through my father’s insurance. When my English wife became pregnant soon after we settled in London, I was alarmed by the idea of having our first child born in a system I had been told was underfunded, overstressed and inefficient. After all, healthcare in the UK was free. How good could it be? Friends and relatives back in the States were spending thousands to have children. If you get what you pay for, I was about to get a whole lot of nothing.

Directly following the birth, we were taken to a large ward whose 20-odd beds were separated by curtains and changing tables. It was visiting hour; the place was alive with excited relatives, shellshocked fathers and the constant susurrus of hungry new life. That first night, however, the atmosphere grew peaceful. Crying babies were attended immediately by sensibly-shod nurses so that others could sleep. But it was after my daughter began to turn the color of saffron rice that I really began to appreciate the NHS. The moment she showed distress, we were whisked off to a private room, where we were looked after by a no-nonsense pediatrician and the imposing Irish ward sister, or chief nurse, who quickly made it clear to me that my sole useful contribution to the whole process had come nine months earlier. Blood was drawn regularly from our daughter’s tiny heel; test results came back promptly. The meals were surprisingly edible. I even developed a taste for the milky tea brought to me by kind nurses. My only complaints over the following week were that the free cookies in the father’s lounge were always running out. And for some reason the ward sister kept giving me withering looks, no matter how dutifully I attended to my family’s needs.

As my blindfolded daughter slept in the incubator’s eerie violet glow, I would take occasional strolls through the ward. It was the most egalitarian place I had ever seen. The yuppie woman honking into her newfangled cell phone, the young Pakistani mother who always seemed to be surrounded by a half-dozen gift-bearing relations, the self-sufficient older woman desperate to get home to look after her other children — all of them were cared for in exactly the same manner. Whoever needed help got it. When a terrified Afghani girl arrived, rumored to be only 14 and apparently abandoned by her family, several nurses dropped what they were doing to teach her the rudiments of child care. The rest of the mothers waited patiently until they were finished. Other wards were the same. There was no private wing with champagne service. Everybody was in this together. If you were a woman and you were in labor and you were in our part of London, this is where you came. If things went wrong, skilled doctors appeared with the latest technology. Nobody asked about insurance or co-pays.

This, I learned, is what the NHS is about — common decency. It is about the shared belief that all the people who live in the United Kingdom constitute a society, and a decent society provides certain necessities for its members. Freedom from hunger is one. Police protection is another. Free healthcare from the cradle to the grave is simply one more item on this list.

I saw this decency at work countless times over the following decade, until my return to the United States. I saw it with the twice-daily home visits by community midwives for the fortnight after each of our newborn children’s release from hospital, and in the vouchers for free milk we were given for those babies. I saw it when our GP paid us a house call early one Sunday morning to treat our son’s spiking fever.

I saw it most clearly, however, in the treatment my in-laws received at the end of their lives. My wife’s father, who suffered from acute myloid dysplasia, spent his last year receiving constant care, including several sprints to the hospital for emergency transfusions, where doctors struggled heroically to keep him alive. His final week was spent in a very comfortable single hospice room whose French doors opened onto a terrace overlooking his beloved Yorkshire moors. When he died, he left us his house, and not a penny of healthcare debt. My mother-in-law, stricken by arthritis, got two artificial hips and two knees from the NHS, and received daily home visits from social workers during the last three years of her life so she would not have to go into a nursing home. Neither of these septuagenarians was working at the time. The amount of money spent on their care must have been staggering. And yet, despite shouldering this yoke of decency, the nation prospered around them. People were buying French wine and German cars and second homes. They were attending Cats and supporting Arsenal and going on holidays in the sun. Sure, people complained about the NHS. But the British complain about everything. Living without a public health system, on the other hand, was unthinkable.

On the day we were finally given the all-clear, there were no papers to sign, no bills to settle. All we had to do was remove our daughter’s blindfold and go. But I felt I had to leave something behind. So I rushed down to the local corner shop and bought several tins of cookies to give the staff who’d looked after us so well. As luck would have it, the Irish ward sister was the only one at the nurse’s station when I arrived. Before I could explain myself, she gave me a tight, approving smile.

“Wondered when you’d start chipping in,” she said, returning to her paperwork. “Just leave them in the father’s lounge.”

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Total Immunity – Washington Post, August 22.09

In Criticism on August 22, 2009 at 2:30 pm

Carelessly Making a Case

 

By Stephen Amidon

Special to The Washington Post 
Saturday, August 22, 2009

TOTAL IMMUNITY

By Robert Ward

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 358 pp. $26

Robert Ward’s turbulent new thriller is set in a world that will feel familiar to fans of television impresarios Michael Mann and Steven Bochco. This is hardly surprising, since Ward is a former writer and producer of “Miami Vice” and “Hill Street Blues,” in addition to being the author of eight previous novels. Set in a contemporary Los Angeles where everyone seems to be involved in either the criminal justice system or the film business (or both), “Total Immunity” opens with the violent FBI bust of a South African diamond smuggler named Karl Steinbach. Leading the raid is Agent Jack Harper, whose college nickname was “Scary” and who proves “as cool as a pitcher of sangria” in the moments leading up to the bust. The smuggler, however, shows an equal degree of sang-froid, vowing before the cuffs are even slapped on his wrists to kill all four FBI agents involved in his arrest.

Jack is initially unfazed by the threat, though he changes his tune when one of his partners is killed after someone severs his car’s brakes. What’s more, Jack suspects that one of his superiors in the Bureau might have helped Steinbach arrange his colleague’s murder. And then another FBI agent is pushed in front of a train. What makes these murders even more ominous is that both are secretly filmed by a shadowy man with a scarred face. Matters become further complicated when Steinbach is released from jail after being granted immunity by a dodgy Homeland Security officer.

As Jack’s investigations continue to produce more questions than answers, the stress and long hours begin to take their toll on his personal life. His girlfriend leaves him, and his neglected 14-year-old son begins to slip into the netherworld of delinquency and drugs. Meanwhile, Jack finds himself in growing jeopardy, most notably when a gangster looses a Gila monster and a coral snake upon him after Jack breaks into the gangster’s sleazy club in search of evidence. Finally, Jack comes to understand fully the exact nature of the powerfully murderous forces set in motion by his seemingly straightforward arrest of a diamond smuggler, though not before they threaten to consume him and those close to him.

Although there is plenty of promise in Ward’s macho ambiance and Los Angeles locales, his writing consistently fails to deliver. His attempts at authorial flourish are often so awkward that they distract the reader. When Steinbach tumbles into a lake during a chase, he flails around “like a beached walrus” — though surely the author had another sea mammal in mind, since walruses perform perfectly well on dry land. Later, when a hulking thug finds himself alone with a sexy lounge singer, “his lizard heart fluttered like a butterfly’s wings inside his massive chest,” a mixture of images that seems more appropriate to an album cover for a psychedelic rock band than a hard-boiled contemporary thriller. At times, Ward’s characters share their author’s verbal awkwardness: Moments after a man gets shot, when he presumably has other things on his mind than parsing figures of speech, he decides that it “was as though someone had drilled a hole in him with a power drill, and for the first time he understood the term ‘drilling someone with a bullet.’ “

These stylistic shortcomings would be less noticeable if they served a more elegant and exciting plot, but after a bold start Ward quickly loses his way. There is really no sense of the inner workings of the FBI, and an inter-bureau squabble with Homeland Security is dealt with in a cursory manner. Despite the car chases, shootouts, imperiled children and venomous reptiles, the book lacks the sort of headlong momentum its pulsating urban setting requires. There are simply too many false leads, too many dead ends. When the big revelation comes, it is so wholly unexpected that it feels like something of a cheat, leaving the reader flailing on a beach a long way from where he started.

Amidon’s most recent novel is “Security.”

 
    

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Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, Sunday Times, July 26, 2009.

In Uncategorized on August 2, 2009 at 1:53 pm

Sunnyside by Glen David Gold

The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon

Glen David Gold’s bustling second novel opens with an evocative if seldom remembered event — the day in 1916 when America underwent what was almost certainly its first media-inspired mass hallucination. From sea to shining sea, citizens reported witnessing Charlie Chaplin in over 800 separate locations, spotting the Little Tramp on buses and main streets, in trains and taxis. He was even reported in a lifeboat. Long before the internet could disseminate rumour at the speed of light, this bizarre visitation demonstrated a star’s ability to enchant the public imagination.

From this magical overture, Gold’s ambitious novel blossoms into several interwoven storylines in an effort to capture a period that saw both the birth of the film industry and the loss of America’s international innocence on the ­killing fields of Flanders. One of these narratives involves Leland Wheeler, a young lighthouse-keeper who “sees” Chaplin in a raft off the Oregon coast during a storm. The event inspires Wheeler to pursue his own screen ­ambitions, though his plans soon go awry when he becomes involved with jewel thieves and is forced to en­list in the army to avoid prison. He finds himself in France during the last days of the first world war, where he eventually comes into possession of two alsatians whose remarkable skills just might win him the fame he’s always wanted.

Running in parallel to Wheeler’s story is that of Hugo Black, the son of a wealthy engineer who is almost killed in a riot during that 1916 Chaplin mania. Black, too, finds himself caught up in the war, shipped to Russia with a secret American force that has been ­dispatched to thwart the newly ­triumphant Bolsheviks.

And of course there is Chaplin himself, depicted at a moment when his career is in danger of ­fizzling out. Threatened by the popularity of his chief screen rival, the petite but dangerously competitive Mary Pickford, as well as by the jealousy of lupine studio heads such as Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldwyn, Chaplin searches with increasing urgency for a way, in the words of a rival film-maker, to make “a film as good as you are”.

It all sounds like the sort of ­panoramic saga that might have come from the pen of EL Doctorow or William Boyd, and at times Gold reaches those heights, most ­particularly with a sequence where Wheeler’s estranged father, a Wild West performer with the unlikely name of Percy Bysshe Duncan, comes undone during a command performance for Kaiser Wilhelm. There is also a remarkable passage in which Chaplin nearly seduces a 15-year-old girl at a beach party. Indeed, Gold’s depictions of ­Chaplin’s struggles, particularly against the studio bosses who are terrified by the prospect of an actor controlling his own destiny, are the best thing about Sunnyside.

Unfortunately, Gold proves less successful in his handling of the novel’s remaining narrative strands. The storyline involving Black has some fine moments, but eventually gets as bogged down as the ­American mission to Russia itself. ­Similarly, Wheeler’s tale, in which Gold devotes a lot of ink to the care and feeding of puppies, might wind up putting off even hardcore dog-­lovers. Equally daunting is the ­novel’s vast amount of period detail, which ultimately leaves the reader wondering if he really needs to know the brand of handcuffs deployed by the cop who arrests Duncan, or the exact ways diamonds were measured in 1917. Eventually, this prodigious research saps the novel’s dramatic urgency. It is a mistake Chaplin, who at his best could cram all human life into a few silent reels, would not have made.

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Love & Obstacles by Aleksander Hemon – Globe and Mail, June 19, 2009

In Criticism on August 2, 2009 at 1:49 pm

Found, and Lost, in America.

by Stephen Amidon Friday, Jun. 19, 2009

In The Noble Truths of Suffering, the best of the eight fine stories that make up Aleksandar Hemon’s new collection, a young Bosnian writer, visiting his homeland after years of exile in the United States, finds himself unexpectedly invited to a party in honour of a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist named Macalister. Before attending, the Bosnian dips into the older writer’s work and discovers a passage he particularly admires: “One of these days the thick chitin of the world will break open, and shit and sorrow will pour out and drown us all. Nothing we say can stop that.” He is especially struck by the use of the word “chitin,” which (I discovered) refers to the tough protective membrane over crustacean shells.  At the reception, held at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Sarajevo, the Bosnian gets drunk and attaches himself to Macalister, who turns out to be an aloof but agreeable character, oddly willing to go wherever the wind takes him, which in this case turns out to be a bar laden with artifacts from the recent civil war, followed by lunch the next day with the Bosnian’s doting parents at their cramped apartment. Nothing, however, can bridge the American’s Zen-like detachment, no matter how hard the young writer tries. “I wanted him to be in awe of Sarajevo, of me, of what we meant in the world,” he confesses. “I wanted to break through to him, through his chitin.” And then, years later, the narrator buys Macalister’s new novel, a tough-minded war story that concludes with the hero visiting the parents of a buddy who was killed in Iraq. In it, the young Bosnian sees unmistakable echoes of that lunch in Sarajevo, including verbatim quotes and evocative portraits of his parents. Belatedly, he understands that he actually had broken through Macalister’s tough skin – just not in ways he intended. “ As he has proved in previous books such as Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, Hemon is a superbly original stylist ” Remarkable in itself, the story also catalogues Hemon’s virtues as a writer: his ability to straddle two distinct cultures, to twist stories in unexpected directions, to find startling uses for the English language. Born in Sarajevo in 1964, Hemon arrived in the United States in 1992 as a tourist, only to find himself stranded when Bosnia descended into chaos. He worked at a variety of odd jobs in Chicago while teaching himself the language of his adoptive country. The lessons proved a success; he is now considered one of the United States’ better young authors, and in 2004 was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. Hemon’s experiences inform the stories in Love and Obstacles, all of which are narrated by men whose biographies bear strong resemblances to the author’s. In Szmura’s Room, he tells the story of Bogdan, a young Bosnian who washes up in Chicago, where he finds lodging with a Ukrainian-American small-time criminal who harbours dreams of becoming an FBI agent. In The Conductor, the young narrator, a Bosnian émigré writer who flees his nation’s civil war, describes his long relationship with a poet who remains in Sarajevo to chronicle the city’s violence and desolation. In Death of the American Commando, a Hemon-like writer is interviewed by a college film student about his childhood in Bosnia, while The Bees, Part 1 details a family’s attempt to keep its beekeeping tradition alive after undergoing a reluctant move from Bosnia to Canada. As he has proved in previous books such as Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, Hemon is a superbly original stylist. As with Conrad and, at times, Nabokov, his late arrival to the English language seems to have endowed him with an ability to conjure surprisingly beautiful phrases. The darkness of an African night is “uncarvable,” a wayward boy is described as having “shrimped up” when he absorbed the beating of an irate hotel clerk, a poet’s florid wife wears “eventful earrings.” An African market sells all manner of exotic meat, including “skinned mongrel creatures that seemed to have been slapped together in hell”; a working-class Chicago suburb is a place “where addresses had five-digit numbers, as though the town was far back of the long line of people waiting to enter downtown paradise.” This freshness of language helps Hemon achieve a deeper purpose: to explore the mechanics of cultural dislocation. In each story, an unhappy immigrant encounters a Conradian doppelganger who provides a mirror of his own tenuous status. This narrative strategy becomes explicit in Stairway to Heaven, when the teenaged son of a low-ranking Yugoslavian diplomat in Zaire, who is prone to carrying around his dog-eared copy of Heart of Darkness, falls under the spell of an American fabulist named Spinelli, an erratic type who claims to have connections to the world of espionage. “There might be a taint of death, a flavour of mortality, in lies,” the boy discovers, “but Spinelli’s were fun to listen to.” One can say the same thing for Hemon’s artfully wicked fables.

Stephen Amidon’s most recent novel, Security, was just published.

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