Frequent readers of this blog will know that I found Chris Adrian’s short story collection “A Better Angel” to be one of the more fascinating short story collections of 2008. Which is why I decided to do an in-depth 2500-word review. In a reviewing culture that rarely gives space to short fiction, and space, when it is alloted, runs to a thousand words, I thought it important to spend a chunk of prose on the collection.
You can find the Chris Adrian review in the January issue of Open Letters.
Here’s an excerpt from the middle:
A Better Angel isn’t exactly a new development on the themes of Adrian’s novels. Its nine stories were published over a decade, between 1997 and 2007, a time period that encompasses Gob’s Grief (2000) and The Children’s Hospital (2006). These stories originated alongside the novels and don’t break from them as much as suture new narratives together with familiar themes. All three books have strong commonalities: as well as the aforementioned angels, there’s an overlapping cast of characters (Dr. Snood, Pickie Beecher, Calvin, and Dr. Siri Chandra—an anagram of Chris Adrian), despair over dead brothers (often twin brothers), and a hospital’s worth of medical argot delivered with surgical snappiness (“Tell me the three classic findings on X-ray in necrotizing enterocolitis.”). If this seems rooted in autobiography, that’s because it is: Adrian has been a divinity student and pediatrician, and his brother died in a car accident in 1993.
