The fantastical and the real collide in Chris Adrian's retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but its emotional core comes from his other life as a doctor treating children with cancer
CHRIS ADRIAN had toyed for years with the idea of retelling a Shakespeare play, but it wasn’t until he moved into a place in the shadow of Buena Vista park in San Francisco that it began to take shape. “It’s just a very strange place,” he says of the park that became the setting for his third novel. “It’s other-worldly at particular times of the day, especially if there’s fog rolling in or the light is hitting it in just the right way. It looks kind of magical.”
It looked like the sort of place for a Chris Adrian story, in other words. His previous book was set in a hospital that somehow miraculously kept afloat after the Earth was flooded under seven miles of water, and throughout his work a taste for playfulness and whimsy has him constantly peeling back the mundane and the ordinary to reveal hidden depths or parallel realms.
Taking A Midsummer Night's Dreamas its template, The Great Nightfinds three heartbroken San Franciscans losing their way in Buena Vista park as darkness falls over the city some time in 2008. In a subterranean community under the park's main hill, meanwhile, live Titania and Oberon – the very ones from Shakespeare's play – who themselves are grieving the loss of a human boy they took under their wings and lost to illness. The walls between the two worlds fall away. Grounded realism and the fantastical coalesce. And we have a story about rejection and loss populated by an elaborately-drawn cast of fairies and little people.
The novel’s inspiration lay firmly in the here-and-now, and owed quite a lot to the division between two worlds in Adrian’s own life: as well as being a novelist, he practises as a paediatric oncologist. The story’s emotional core forms around a scenario he knows well – the death of a child from leukaemia. Adrian even traces his first inklings of his plot to a plaintive appeal he once heard from a little girl fed up with how her medical treatment required her to fast.
"'Can I not just have one tiny feast,' she asked," Adrian recalls. "When I heard that, when I thought what a tiny feast would look like, and who would make one, it all kind of fell together." The Great Nightwas written between hospital shifts, and Adrian – currently in Paris for an academic term to teach literature – concedes he may one day have to choose between his two careers. A wry, soft-spoken 40-year-old, he talks enthusiastically of writer-physicians such as Chekhov or William Carlos Williams, who is said to have written poems between patients on a typewriter bolted to his desk. "It seems there are more and more physicians writing all the time, but it seems most people end up giving it up once they get to either a certain level of commitment or success," he says.
Adrian’s own success looked assured early on. When he finished his first book while a graduate student, he came quickly to the attention of Lois Rosenthal at Story magazine, who took a liking to his work and began mentioning his name to editors and agents. Getting his first book published was relatively easy, but its sales disappointed his publisher and he then had to start all over again.
"The second novel was so strange . . . that it went to 18 or 19 people, and I gave up eventually and started to destroy the manuscript out of pique. Then, by accident, a friend mentioned to Dave Eggers [of McSweeney's] that I had a novel no one would publish, and he asked to see it. That was probably the only publisher who would have responded in the way that they did." Many of those who rejected the book later told him how much they liked his work, Adrian recalls, sounding more amused than bitter. "It's a funny thing, how hard it is for publishers to estimate what readers will tolerate." His star has been rising ever since; in 2010, the New Yorkerincluded him alongside Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss and Yiyun Li in its list of 20 writers under 40 "who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction".
Adrian says his style is a reflection of how his own interests have evolved. As a teenager he was a science fiction devotee, and he believes he returned to fantasy as a writer to find a language that enabled him to deal with things that bothered him in the most straightforward way. References to Irish mythology turn up in the new book – the product, he says, of his mother's contagious excitement about her Irish heritage (her parents were Irish emigrants). One of the few books he read while writing The Great Nightwas WB Yeats's collection of Irish fairy tales.
If fantasy offers a language, Adrian deploys it in the service of ideas that are often bound up with his doctor’s view of the world. How medics deal with death and grieving has been a recurring preoccupation – so much so that he recently did a Master’s in Divinity at Harvard partly out of a desire to see what lessons he could learn about comforting the families of sick children.
He sees writing and medicine as complementary rather than antagonistic. The sustained practice of “trying to get into someone else’s head or imagine the world from their point of view” probably makes it easier to relate to a patient as “a person sitting across from you and not just a disease or a label or a problem”. Similarly, the discipline and systematic thinking required of a medical student has helped him focus on his imaginative work, where he can “corral my interests and obsessions. Just being witness to ordinary and extraordinary human drama in the hospital is something that is good for you as a writer, and that I’m lucky to get to have,” he adds.
Of course the two mindsets – the writer’s and the doctor’s – don’t always feel perfectly in sync, he remarks. Hospitals tend to encourage on-the-job day-dreaming less than creative writing tutors. “The patients need you to be paying attention to what you’re supposed to be doing, and not wondering what colour spots you should be putting on your magic pony in your magic-pony story.”
The Great Night by Chris Adrian is published by Granta
