Click here to read our Q&A with Vincent Lam
By Max Fawcett
It isn’t as dangerous as an addiction to crystal methamphetamine, cocaine or other hard drugs, but there are plenty of people who just as are hopelessly addicted to the idea of becoming a doctor. That addiction has been fed in part by a generation of television shows like Grey’s Anatomy, House and ER, programs that have managed to imbue the messy business of medicine with a sex appeal traditionally reserved for professions like race car drivers and runway models. It’s not a cure, but the raw and unvarnished honesty that defines the stories in Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures would make even the most aggressively ambitious medical student reconsider their choice, if only for a moment.
Lam’s collection of short stories focuses on the lives of four young doctors, Ming, Sri, Chen, and Fitzgerald, but these characters are nothing like the ones you might see on television. Moments of heroic virtue are few and far between, and are outnumbered by personal failure, professional ineptitude, and other expressions of human weakness. Instead, Lam’s stories portray flawed human beings dealing with other flawed human beings, and the ugliness that can and does ensue from those interactions.
And while Lam addresses the often inhumane demands of becoming a doctor, from the hermetic academic dedication required to meet the demands of medical school to the constant battle against total physical exhaustion that defines their working lives, he is at his best when describing the toll those sacrifices can take on the people who make them. If there’s one thing that emerges above all else from Lam’s stories, it is that the decision to become a doctor comes with costs that extend well beyond the trivialities of student loans and midnight rotations.
The irony inherent to Lam’s book is that while he describes the demands of being a doctor in excruciating detail, he has managed to defy them, and in rather spectacular fashion. Thirty-something doctors aren’t supposed to have time to chew their food, after all, much less write books. Yet somehow, be it by force of will or the creative use of a personal time machine, Lam managed to do just that. He took one of the most basic principles of the craft – write about what you know – and turned it into one of the finest books published in Canada so far this century. It joins books like Rawi Hage’s Cockroach and Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce as a central part of Canada’s new literary canon, one that is defined by the exploration of Canada’s contemporary realities rather than indulgent reflections on its past. Readers can only hope that Lam, now a father of two young children, can somehow find the time to write a follow up.
Click here to read our Q&A with Vincent Lam
Category: Work
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