The Dork of Cork
Collins, Clare
and tailored endings and his application of just-the-right-dose of "compassion." Death and Dignity is a strictly utilitarian argument driven by sentiment. In a society that sees little earthly...
...Despite Frank's deformities (and Frank does feel he's deformed), Raymo imbues him with such humanity that he avoids a common failing of novelists: turning characters into bizarre, nasty caricatures, with actions so unbelievable that it's hard for the reader to understand, let alone sympathize, with them...
...Even the sinister Hans Scrieber, who seduces, then discards Emma, leaving her completely unhinged, is a unique villain...
...In fact, she was dead-from the overdose he had provided...
...I admit, I was leery of reading a book about a little person set in Ireland, especially given the off-beat title...
...Allowing" death, however, is something decidedly different from actively facilitating it, which is what Quill is proposing...
...Called Nightstalk, his book is, he tells us, "a work on the night sky, descriptive and poetic, with a generous lacing of personal history...
...What is beautiful is always more desirable than what is not beautiful...
...He also introduces Frank to what soon becomes his passion: stargazing...
...Facilitating such timely and compassionate deaths, he says, ought to be considered "a fundamentally vital role for physicians...
...to the splendor of comets and constellations and lunar eclipses, which he studies from his rooftop in a down-at-the-heels section of Cork, Ireland...
...I'm not that kind of person either...
...For as long as he can remember, Frank has looked to the night sky for company...
...The study says that nearly 25 percent of cancer patients "die with severe, unrelieved pain...
...Likewise, Bernadette might be distant and self-absorbed, but Raymo has taken pains to see that we understand how her experiences in war-torn France damaged her ability to love...
...Set almost entirely in and around Cork, Frank begins his story at the end of World War II, when he is conceived by his stowaway French mother, the beautiful Bernadette, aboard a U.S.-bound troop carrier which stops in Cork Harbor for provisioning...
...Quill and Kevorkian want to force the hand of death, to speed up its house calls...
...At one point, Raymo, who has a taste for the brutal, manages to force this issue upon the reader, through a conversation between Frank and his editor: "Tell me, Jennifer, do you think that--hypothetically--do you think that you could fall in love with me...
...It is a prerogative too many already feel is theirs...
...If that is the case, Quill's argument hardly amounts to a persuasive reason to legalize euthanasia-on-demand...
...Quill's language is consistently beguiling and misleading...
...When I arrived at their house," he writes, "Diane indeed seemed peaceful...
...Isolated by his deformity, Frank has led a solitary, lonely life...
...What dissuades most of this nurse's patients from calling for a final, magic bullet...
...Writing as a philosopher, Maritain drew a distinction between "two essentially different types of periodicals, the one specifically Catholic and religious, and as a result Catholic by definition...
...If it's any consolation, Jennifer, I don't blame you...
...Quill provides no statistics, offers no surveys of hospitals, hospices, or nursing homes...
...As an adult, he finds the prospect of romance--or for that matter, any sexual encounter--unlikely...
...If I have one complaint with the Dork of Cork, it is that the ending is a little too neat, too precious...
...There are a host of other likable, slightly daffy characters, among them Roger Manning, the Protestant curate who writes erotic poetry and dreams of domesticating Bernadette, and Handy Paige, the half-soused literary agent who never fails to remind Frank that dwarfism sells...
...When death comes before its time, some of life's best and most important moments are lost...
...But the study then examines the reasons for this sad statistic--including doctors' lack of pain-management skills--and offers a wide range of practical policies and medical modalities that would dramatically lower it...
...As mentioned before, Quill stakes out his main premise early on: "Untreatable suffering prior to death is unfortunately not rare...
...Still, he continues to act as a friend to Bernadette and a father figure to Frank...
...And Jack's daughter Emma comes, for Frank, to embody the stars' physical beauty and unreachable distance...
...Instead, he relies on anecdotes, mostly from his own practice...
...Apprehended by immigration officials, Bernadette manages to escape into the streets of Cork, making the city her home...
...Soon after, Jack and Bernadette become lovers...
...Range of help" may be a Hallmarkean improvement on the term "physician-assisted suicide," but at least the latter is not misleading...
...We meet Frank when he is on the verge of great fame, having written a much-anticipated memoir, soon to be published by Penguin...
...Rather, the country offers a fitting haunt for one such as Frank, providing a sufficient number of dour dark settings for the novel's black humor...
...It is because of my deformity that the publisher has such confidence in the marketability of my book," Frank is compelled to add...
...This is a role entirely out of character for Kelly, faithful father of six, and the affair is cut short when his daughter Emma witnesses their lovemaking...
...Clare Collins ~ rank Bois is a dwarf, 43 inches tall and 43 years old...
...George G. Higgins ~ ifty-odd years ago, Jacques Maritain published a brief but incisive essay on "The Problem of the Catholic Press" as an appendix to his book, True Humanism, which dealt with a series of questions belonging to that section of phiE losophy which Aristotle and Saint Thomas called "Practical...
...But this is not, in particular, a book about Ireland...
...the other specifically political or 'cultural,' which we must indubitably wish to be "Voila" 24:16 July 1993 Commonweal...
...To reveal it would spoil everything, but I wish Raymo hadn't succumbed to the need to put everything aright in the end...
...She told me that when it came to untreatable pain, she had run into such instances about once every five years...
...By turning even the word "vital" on its head, Quill has effectively delegated physicians as the final arbiters of power and control...
...I asked a nursing supervisor who has worked with terminally ill cancer patients full-time over the last fifteen years what her experience had been...
...Quill's other euphemisms for physician-assisted suicide include "a controlled death" and a "nonviolent death...
...A LONG VIEW, A SHORT MAN THE DORK OF CORK Chet Raymo Warner Books, $18.95,354 pp...
...The "problem" of the Catholic press which Maritain analyzed had nothing to do with a rise in printing costs or a decline in circulation figures or any of the other bread-and-butter problems which are the bane of every publisher's existence, but it was and still is a very "practical" problem nonetheless...
...The fictional book within a book provides the underlying conceit for The Dork of Cork, an enchanting novel by Chet Raymo, a professor of physics at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, a science columnist for the Boston Globe, and the author of 365 Start3, Nights and The Soul of the Night...
...He states that Diane "taught me about the range of help" he could provide patients in similar circumstances...
...And, by contrasting the beauty of the heavens--here Raymo's writing can be stunning--with more earthy flaws, he continually forces the reader to examine "how beauty and hurt get jumbled up together...
...When that happens, we and our loved ones are all diminished...
...A recent Catholic Health Association publication, "Care of the Dying: A Catholic Perspective" (The Catholic Health Association, Saint Louis), does provide some disheartening figures, ones Quill might have liked to quote...
...Compassionate care, for her, necessarily implies and includes skilled pain management...
...Thus, Quill says, "allowing someone a peaceful, dignified death can be a very sad, loving gift...
...His liaison with Emma nets him the Nobel Prize...
...Throughout, Raymo demonstrates a scientist' s talent for order by intertwining Frank's first-person narration with that of the book within a book without confusing the reader...
...The book's subtitle, "Making Choices and Taking Charge," combines two powerful political lodestars...
...It seems Scrieber can only produce his amazing scientific theories when inspired by a mistress...
...Instead of the patience and dedication such a course of treatment--already available-relies on, Drs...
...Tis a lad,' he said, beaming into the imploring eyes of the exhausted girl...
...Months later, Jack Kelly, the immigration officer who first interviewed Bernadette, sees her on the street and attends to her baby's birth: "...the midwife pulled from Bernadette's womb the unfortunate child, a squashed sort of thing Commonweal 16 July 1993:23with legs and arms disproportionately small compared to the torso, like sprouts budding from the eyes of a potato....He saw the fright in the face of the girl who was, after all, not much older than his daughter...
...In a society that sees little earthly reason for enduring physical (or mental) suffering, and which fears "the loss of control" over one's life as a fate worse than death, Quill's radical medicine will go down relatively easily...
...I would like to be the kind of person that could fall in love with you, but I'm not," she responds...
...COMMONWEAL: THE SEQUEL BEING CATHOLIC Commonweal from the 1970s to the 1990s Rodger Van Allen Loyola University Press, $12.95,203 pp...
...This history includes his peculiar upbringing by a distant, troubled mother who, as a child, witnessed an unspeakable tragedy in Ig Nazi-occupied France...
...Also central to his tale is the influence of three men, his mother's lovers, who become, at various times, his surrogate fathers...
...A doctor who is steeped in this culture and who has already run out of technological fixes, will see little reason to persuade a patient to fight on longer...
...But is this actually the case, and if it is, does it need to be...
...Compassionate care makes them feel valued," she says...
...Death probably won't object, but care-givers ought to know and do better...
...In the United States, if you can't make your own choices and can't control your own destiny, you have, in effect, lost much of the impetus for living...
...Still, it is a small criticism for a book alive with so many enduring characters...
Vol. 120 • July 1993 • No. 13
