March 30, 2006
David Nutt, "Melancholera"
Last week, while idly flipping through the current issue of Open City at the end of a long workday, I came across David Nutt's short story, titled "Melancholera." It chronicles, in first-person narration, the pendular swings from sickness to health of a young boy suffering from lupus, Lyme disease, spinal meningitis, and other serious maladies. The boy is precocious, smart enough to offer lucid observations about family, friends, and the ever-shifting terrain of his own body but never so clever as to seem a mere cipher for the author's musings. The story moves along languidly, proceeding from the "Winter of Mysterious Stiffness" through the "Summer of Lethargy and Malaise" to the "Spring of Dizziness and Dementia." Nutt is a very gifted writer, stringing together highly evocative phrases without once calling attention to his literary acrobatics. He even manages for the boy's narration to conceivably impart clear impressions of all that he is missing while sequestered in various hospital beds. (See excerpt below.) "Melancholera" isn't perfect, as the ending speeds unnaturally through the narrator's teenage years to a vignette about his adult life with a loving, breadwinning wife. But it's as close as I've encountered recently, and as good as anything published in the New Yorker, which makes it all the more stunning that, according to his bio on the contributors' page, this is Nutt's first published story. Three cheers to the intern or editor who pulled this one out of the slush pile.
An excerpt, chosen at random:
The doctor shook his head, spelled out the new illness on an index card I quickly tore to pieces and scattered in an assortment of wastebaskets. I couldn't care less what it was called as I spent the beginning weeks of school confined to a hospital bed under close supervision. My body felt feeble and deflated, like a loose-fitting shirt someone else refused to wear. Sitting up became painful. Walking proved an absolute hazard. There were days I thought sneezing would be the end of me. I adopted a fierce regimen of hourly sulking, aware that new friendships were currently being forged beneath soccer field bleachers, freshly cemented pals-for-life peering up the shadowy hollows of coeds' skirts. Meanwhile, I sat listening to my father read the telephone book in Elizabethan voice after he exhausted the children's shelf of the hospital library.
The story alone is worth the cover price , but the issue also contains a pleasant-enough reminiscence of tea at the Plaza by Philip Lopate and a whimsical portfolio of watercolors (reproduced in black-and-white) by Molly Smith, a recent Columbia Graduate who has exhibited with KS Art.