The Spirit of the Place (2008)

THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE – Review (Jim O’Toole, The American Oxonian)

THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE, by Samuel Shem (a.k.a. Stephen Bergman, Massachusetts and Balliol, ’66) Kent State University Press, 2008

Reviewed by Jim O’Toole, The American
Oxonian (California and Hertford, ’66)

At one time or another in that long and often tortuous journey of human growth that we hope ends in wisdom, almost all of us feel compelled to “return home” in an attempt to learn who we are through discovering where we came from and what early influences shaped the persons we were to become. In his (now largely unread) 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe chronicled the all-too-frequent disappointment of those who attempt such a side excursion from life’s main path. Indeed, most people seem to find that their old homes aren’t what they used to be, or what they thought they were; many even fail to locate any real home, at all.

But the protagonist in Samuel Shem’s award-winning novel, The Spirit of the Place, not only goes home again, he finds there what has been missing in his life: strong ties to family and community. Orville Rose, M.D., is a modern American wandering Jew, a Leopold Bloom from “Columbia”-on-Hudson. Rootless and purposeless, he travels the globe without a moral compass in futile search of just what he doesn’t know. The theme may be familiar, but Shem infuses the old story with layers of original insight and contemporary significance. Rose, the reader finds, is every disillusioned American Baby Boomer. His home town–divided by racial, religious, and ideological antagonisms, and rife with drugs, violence, and materialism—has all that is the worst of America (and, paradoxically, also the best in terms of the ability to adapt, innovate, and coalesce around common values). And the moral of the book is universal: if we are patient, willing to engage in deep reflection and, above all, willing to make ourselves vulnerable by opening up to others, we all can learn a great deal by returning to the places where it began.

Orville Rose is a lost soul when he returns to Columbia. When faced with the need to make any meaningful commitment, his predilection is to run away. But in Columbia he gradually learns the true lesson is not that you can’t go home again; instead, it is that you can’t run away. The town’s movers and shakers are hell bent on tearing down an historically significant old hotel on the main square in order to erect a shopping mall. At first, Orville is indifferent to the efforts of preservationists to prevent the destruction of the building, but in the nick of time he sees that he is running away from a social obligation to act, and ends up taking a principled stand to save the hotel. Shem uses preservation as a metaphor for the longing for lost youth, a past that cannot be relived, but can be positively reclaimed through reflection and forgiveness.

In particular, Orville learns that he must come to terms, finally, with the memory of his recently deceased, and decidedly difficult, mother (whose “spirit” he sees floating about the streets of the city). Shem is telling us to face the fact that we don’t outgrow the effects of our parents until we die; hence, it is prudent to deal with them even after they are gone. Orville finally gets mom to quit hovering overhead by saying to her spirit the things he should have said while she was alive.

I may be making the book sound sentimental, or preachy. Fear not: Samuel Shem is the very same author of the comic best seller, The House of God, and too skilled a writer to let his story become a sermon. In strong evidence in these pages are Shem’s trademark humor, ribaldry, and ability to turn emergency room surgery into a madcap tragi-comedy of gushing blood and nauseating gore. For example, Columbia’s hunters are habitually…blasting off parts of their own bodies—a toe, a foot, a finger, a hand, an arm, a leg, a head—yes, even a head—leaving gaping wounds behind. Exhausted by all this, Orville worked like crazy to find creative solutions, ways to make these remnants of severings and eviscerations and amputations and gapings and, out of them, as the New York antiquers were always putting it, make art—that is, make not necessarily humans but bodies.

A major theme of the book is medicine as art. Physician Rose, by necessity, must harden himself in order to cope with the unspeakable horrors of the emergency room. But in the process, he risks losing his humanity. To be a fully functioning human—and an effective doctor—Rose must be both a scientist and an artist. Perhaps Shem’s greatest strength as a writer is his ability to resolve the tension between C.P. Snow’s “two cultures,” science and the humanities. That’s probably because the author has a foot firmly planted in both worlds: On the one foot, before pursuing his medical degree at Harvard, Stephen Bergman earned a doctorate in experimental physiology from Oxford (he wired the brains of cockroaches to learn something or other); on other foot, he and his wife, Janet Surrey, co-authored a critically acclaimed play about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous that recently ran off-Broadway. In The Spirit of the Place, as in his three previous novels, Shem/Bergman brings compassion to the medical profession, and wisdom about the human condition to us all.

The Spirit of the Place contains everything – and more

By Steve Love

The Spirit of the Place contains everything – and more – that author Samuel Shem became (in)famous for delivering in The House of God, his hilarious (unless you’ve ever had to visit a doctor), iconic novel about medical education and the healthcare it underpins.

There is sex and love, disease and death, laughs and exploding bodies (yes, they go together), doctor-patient-neighbor relationships among complex characters with coexisting streaks of good and evil. Unlike The House, however, there is a universality that pulses beyond the hospital and into the community to rage at small-town and big-time issues of the day (guns, medical insurance, historical preservation, the 1980s Reagan Revolution). Appealingly troubled protagonist Dr. Orville Rose is haunted by a blackmailing mother – dead, but not departed – who forces him to return to his hated hometown in order to gain his inheritance, find equilibrium and overcome what she believes is a greater capacity for selfishness and hatred than for love.

The Spirit soars in the supernatural guise of mother Selma Rose but is no ghost story. Rather, it is a connecting journey between life and death, seismically registered in head and heart.

In his new novel, published by The Kent State University Press in its literature and medicine series, Shem, pen name of Dr. Stephen Bergman, answers forevermore the question of whether he is first and foremost a writer or a physician. As a physician trained in psychiatry, Bergman may be able to dissect a human body or explore the depths of the mind, but it is as Shem the writer that he plumbs the human spirit with an instrument sharper than any scalpel.

Bergman always had in mind being a writer. He explained as much in an afterword to a later edition of his 1978 The House of God and revealed details of his life that foreshadow the characters of The Spirit of the Place and its setting – Columbia, a small town in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Here, Orvy learns, as Bergman once did, the Chekhovian differentiations of life as it should be and life as it is. There are many things, he finds, that a doctor cannot cure.

Life’s contradictions, medical and otherwise, inspire Shem’s work. They are expected to be a part of the discussion during a two-day Return to The House of God Symposium in Cleveland October 22 and 23 in which Shem will participate. While the symposium, sponsored by The Center for Literature, Medicine and Biomedical Humanities at Hiram College and the Cleveland Clinic Department of Academic Medicine, will concentrate on the impact of The House of God on medical education and physicians during the past 30 years, it is in The Spirit of the Place that Shem broadens his story to family, professional and community relationships.

[Following is an alternative graph to the above if the review is not published prior to symposium:]
Life’s contradictions, medical and otherwise, inspire Shem’s work. In The House of God, Shem laid medical training as bare as a corpse on a pathology table, cut out its diseased heart and held its failed humanity in his hands for all to see, physician and patient alike. Teaching physicians treated their protégés with so little regard it is no wonder bonds between new physicians and their patients were too often weak or nonexistent. Shem exposed medicine as more than technique and technology. It is about caring connections, human to human, about listening not only to the story of disease on the patient’s chart but also to his entire life story. In The Spirit of the Place, these relationships move beyond professional to family and community.

[End alternative paragraph]
Life’s fullness and flaws create the spirit of this place that is Columbia, a place that is, as damaged but undaunted town historian Miranda Braak tells it, one of “breakage and resilience.” Whatever can go wrong in Columbia will go wrong, including its people. It is the town joke, and, until Orvy comes to better understand the phenomenon that is the shared human journey, he mistakenly believes it makes a joke of the town to which he has been compelled to return.

There are echoes of previous Shem characters, themes and techniques, including pointed and poignant letters from a parent, in this case Orvy’s dead mother, who has found the perfect posting co-conspirator in Miranda. But Shem also has forged ahead into new terrain of the spirit that includes but goes beyond the medicine practiced by the sometimes bumbling but beloved town doctor who is Orvy’s inspiration, example and nominal partner in a small-town practice.

Though Shem’s characters in The Spirit of the Place are less singularly memorable than the Fat Man, House of God residentwhose rules and caring saved not only patients but also interns, these Columbians are richer, fuller and deeper, particularly Miranda, Selma and her granddaughter Amy and Henry Schooner, childhood bully with a grown-up golden veneer that only Orvy sees through. Even a clichéd, cinematic conclusion cannot diminish the connection a readers will feel with Shem’s characters – especially his surprisingly strong women.

In Return to The House of God: Medical Resident Education 1978-2008 (The Kent State University Press), Amy Haddad and other essayists addressing Shem’s work take him to task for treating women as dim, sexual objects. Their accusation fails to persuade. Even if The House were once a sign of the sexual times, Shem is no serial sexist. The strong women of The Spirit of the Place demonstrate with their lives (and deaths) that “maybe love is just not giving up on people.” Sam Shem never does.

Steve Love, a Hiram College graduate student, is a retired Beacon Journal chief editorial writer and columnist.

“When a class has this much enthusiasm for a book, it bodes well for its future.”

Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 3:59 PM
To: Stephen Bergman
Subject: a master’s class and “The Spirit of the Place”

Dear Steve,

I have just finished teaching a Master’s class where we had a wonderful time. The work for today was “The Spirit of the Place.”  All these students had read “The House of God” first.  They really loved talking about both novels, but I think we may be the first class to read and discuss “Spirit.”  You will meet all these students because they will be at the symposium.  I thought you’d like to know that I could hardly get a word in as they discussed Columbia, Selma, Orvy, Cray, Miranda, Bill, Henry, Milt, Amy, Penny.  Often the class broke out in loud laughter (as in the dynamiting of the ice fishing hole).  Other times everyone was sad and sober (as in Selma’s last letter and her last appearance to Orvy). They discussed the problems of keeping secrets and not revealing important truths. They were keenly aware of the transitions from anger and hurt to compassion and caring.  They saw Bill and Orvy in some ways as versions of Fats and Roy 20 years later.  They rejoiced in the 3-dimensional characters and the strong women. They recognized some local politician in Henry, and wholeheartedly believed that Orvy was being symbolic when he gave Henry the bird.

So congratulations, Steve.  When a class has this much enthusiasm for a book, it bodes well for its future.

Carol Donley
Co-Director
Hiram College Institute of Medicine and Humanities

With simple, elegant language, Samuel Shem captures ‘The Spirit of the Place’

By Laura Marshall, Special to The Berkshire Eagle

Sunday, August 17
“The Spirit of the Place, “by Samuel Shem
Kent State University Press, 334 pages

When Orville Rose was a 6-year-old kid back in Columbia, N.Y., he had an epiphany: He was connected to something larger than himself. It was something to do with the clouds floating by overhead; as they passed him and went on to other places, he felt that inevitable click into a bigger world.

Thrilled, he ran indoors to share his vision with his mother. “Something else!” he shouted. “Mom, I’m part of something else!”

And his mother, Selma Rose, gave a withering sigh. “Orville-doll, there’s nothing else but this.”

And that was the beginning of Orville’s flight.

At the opening of “The Spirit of the Place,” the latest, heartbreakingly beautiful novel from Newton author Samuel Shem, it is 1984 and 40-year-old Orville has returned to Columbia after years and years away.

He’s been running for a long time, looking for something greater than himself, something outside himself, something better than what he sees in Columbia and what he calls, with distaste, Columbians. Now a physician, he has seen the world with Doctors without Borders; he has tried on the life of a wanderer and found it to his liking; and he has discovered love dressed up as an eccentric, bewitching New Age yogi
who spouts just enough enlightenment to keep him confused.

But nothing he has seen out in the world has prepared him for what he finds back at home.

Orville has come back for his mother’s funeral, but because of his rootless existence his sister’s letter with the details of the services was delayed weeks in reaching him and he has missed it.

When he hears about his mother’s will, he wishes he had missed his flight back to the United States. For she has left him everything — her house, her car and $1 million — on one condition: that he stay in Columbia and live in his boyhood home for exactly one year and 13 days from the date of his arrival in town.

At first, Orville balks. Not even the money can keep him there, in what he sees as a kind of backwater cesspool, full of horrible memories. Everywhere he goes, people know him and he knows them, and
that’s exactly what he doesn’t want.

Life, however, gets in the way. First, his sister says he can’t see his niece if he doesn’t intend to serve his term, and Orville and 11-year-old Amy are kindred spirits. So he sticks around for a few days to see if Amy’s mom won’t soften up a little.

Then he visits his former mentor, Dr. Bill Starbuck, the town doc, who patches up the locals with the snake oil he calls “Starbusol.” Turns out the octogenarian wouldn’t mind an extra hand dealing with the
bumps and scrapes and gunshot wounds the hamlet’s residents seem to get themselves into.

Then Orville gets a letter from his deceased mother, and it seems if he stays he’ll keep receiving them until his sentence is up. If he goes, well, he’ll never find out what she has to say from beyond the grave.

Then his mother starts appearing to him, flying around the ghostly, empty house and the dumpy little town. And boy, does she have a lot to say.

Then he gets a call from his beloved, whose name happens to be Celestina Polo, and Celestina Polo tells him she will be unable to join him in swampy Columbia as planned, as she has fallen in with a wealthy banker who plans to finance a yoga commune –oh, but she does adore him and cannot wait to see him again and if it is not to be now then perhaps someday.

And then, in the first shock of grief over losing Celestina, Orville meets a lovely single mother, a widow named Miranda. She’s the local historian, and they share a single sweet moment together on a rainy
afternoon. And that’s when things get complicated.

“The Spirit of the Place” is a rare ode to home, not only to finding a place in the world but to connecting with someone who feels like home. It’s a love song to history, global and national and regional and local and personal. It’s an essay on the power and fallibility of medicine, told by a doctor– Samuel Shem is the pen name of Dr. Stephen Bergman, who graduated from Harvard Medical School, had a private practice in psychiatry for nearly 30 years, and in 1978 published “The House of God,” a novel used in the curriculum of medical schools today. It’s the story of a man and his mother, the give-and-take of that relationship, the slow revelations that keep flowing between the two even with distance or time or death keeping them apart.

What makes the book so rare is its fragile beauty. Shem’s language is simple and elegant even as he delves into the essences of his characters. And he doesn’t shy away from their complexity –rather, he embraces it, allowing us to see them as whole, imperfect, impatient, reckless, uncertain, vulnerable, delirious, selfish, loving.

Orville and Miranda and her small son, Cray, are about as complex and real and fragile and beautiful as characters can be, and their story is uplifting in its unorthodox trajectory.

Because sometimes it’s not about connecting with something larger.

Sometimes it’s about just connecting.

Q&A with Dr. Stephen Bergman

The Spirit of the Place
By Lorrie Klosterman and illustrations by Annie Internicola, July 29, 2008

It is with three decades experience as a doctor and a penchant for storytelling that Stephen Bergman, MD, PhD (pen name, Samuel Shem), writes with wit and heart about both sides of the doctor/patient relationship. His highly acclaimed first book, The House of God (1978), continues to sell beyond the two-million mark and is today required reading at many medical schools worldwide because of its authentic depiction of hospital internship, the grueling year medical students must endure as they transition from textbooks to the real world of doctoring. Specializing in psychiatry, Dr. Bergman lectures widely at colleges and medical schools, and has also written the novels Mount Misery (sequel to The House of God) and Fine, the nonfiction book We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues between Women and Men, written with wife Janet Surrey and also penned with Surrey the off-Broadway play “Bill W. and Dr. Bob,” the story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous (available on DVD).

Read the rest of the article >>

Leslie Epstein, Director, Boston University Creative Writing Program

Shem,

It’s getting close to midnight and I just finished your novel. I figure you are in Costa Rica, but will get this when you return.

Let me say at once it is the most emotionally daring novel I know. It dances out where no one else is willing to go. And it is very moving to see your characters out there, taking such enormous risks–and all the time knowing that YOU are the one taking them. I thought of Holden Caufield saying that after reading Out of Africa he wanted to call Isaac Dinneson and complete the connection. Well, your readers should be lining up to call you: and what a special treat to already know you and have you for a friend. I’m thinking particularly here of the death of Bill, the Doc. What an absolutely remarkable scene. Again, you dare to let the tears fall–and they mean so much more coming from essentially tearless people, people living behind a damn they pray will never crack.

This novel (like all art) shakes the ground and makes the cracks appear. (variation on Kafka’s art is the ax we use against the frozen sea within us). Anyway, your remarks about connectedness did two things for me. It reminded me of Jay Neugeboren’s remarkable review in NY Review of Books about six weeks ago, a book by a woman who was ONLY helped by the talking cure, after decades of drugs. Jay has a brother who was helped in the same way. Jay’s conclusion is that what matters is not the insight or the talk but simply THE CONNECTEDNESS, the sense that another human being is in the same room, and cares. After Jay’s review and your novel, I had the same impulse: to call my own brother. And in both cases I did (luckily he wasn’t home).

–I’ll tell you this: if he hadn’t gotten off that train on the last page (and I was already rationalizing things, saying, well, we can’t be sentimental, we have to be realistic, and all that stuff–but basically Iwanted to kill him and his author) we’d have had our last calimari together. Go back to that Italian gold digger? The phony of all time? If I’d been wearing a hat tonight I’d have thrown it in the air; I’d already shouted Hooray! And with what dignity does the retreating, huddled family turn around, stand up, and then run to him.

All the relationships are excellent (though I am not sure I understand why Miranda goes away–neither is she, I see at the end; nor did I know why Orville gets on the train–and again, we see, neither does he) my favorite in a way was Henry-Orvy. Henry is a great portrait. I’m such a Christian, at heart, that I wanted to believe in his wish for forgiveness and redemption. You MASTERFULLY kept me wishing and doubting until the very end, and then never fully exploited either forgiveness or punishment: he ended up a rich portrait of an appalling and yet all too human being.

He, like so much else in the book, is a wonderful achievement

Congratulations, Shemie. I hope people are emotionally open to the challenge that The Spirit of the Place presents them.

–Leslie Epstein, Director, Boston University Creative Writing Program, author of KING OF THE JEWS and SAN REMO DRIVE.

The Spirit of the Place contains everything – and more

By Steve Love

The Spirit of the Place contains everything – and more – that author Samuel Shem became (in)famous for delivering in The House of God, his hilarious (unless you’ve ever had to visit a doctor), iconic novel about medical education and the healthcare it underpins.

There is sex and love, disease and death, laughs and exploding bodies (yes, they go together), doctor-patient-neighbor relationships among complex characters with coexisting streaks of good and evil. Unlike The House, however, there is a universality that pulses beyond the hospital and into the community to rage at small-town and big-time issues of the day (guns, medical insurance, historical preservation, the 1980s Reagan Revolution). Appealingly troubled protagonist Dr. Orville Rose is haunted by a blackmailing mother – dead, but not departed – who forces him to return to his hated hometown in order to gain his inheritance, find equilibrium and overcome what she believes is a greater capacity for selfishness and hatred than for love.

The Spirit soars in the supernatural guise of mother Selma Rose but is no ghost story. Rather, it is a connecting journey between life and death, seismically registered in head and heart.

In his new novel, published by The Kent State University Press in its literature and medicine series, Shem, pen name of Dr. Stephen Bergman, answers forevermore the question of whether he is first and foremost a writer or a physician. As a physician trained in psychiatry, Bergman may be able to dissect a human body or explore the depths of the mind, but it is as Shem the writer that he plumbs the human spirit with an instrument sharper than any scalpel.

Bergman always had in mind being a writer. He explained as much in an afterword to a later edition of his 1978 The House of God and revealed details of his life that foreshadow the characters of The Spirit of the Place and its setting – Columbia, a small town in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Here, Orvy learns, as Bergman once did, the Chekhovian differentiations of life as it should be and life as it is. There are many things, he finds, that a doctor cannot cure.

Life’s contradictions, medical and otherwise, inspire Shem’s work. They are expected to be a part of the discussion during a two-day Return to The House of God Symposium in Cleveland October 22 and 23 in which Shem will participate. While the symposium, sponsored by The Center for Literature, Medicine and Biomedical Humanities at Hiram College and the Cleveland Clinic Department of Academic Medicine, will concentrate on the impact of The House of God on medical education and physicians during the past 30 years, it is in The Spirit of the Place that Shem broadens his story to family, professional and community relationships.

[Following is an alternative graph to the above if the review is not published prior to symposium:]
Life’s contradictions, medical and otherwise, inspire Shem’s work. In The House of God, Shem laid medical training as bare as a corpse on a pathology table, cut out its diseased heart and held its failed humanity in his hands for all to see, physician and patient alike. Teaching physicians treated their protégés with so little regard it is no wonder bonds between new physicians and their patients were too often weak or nonexistent. Shem exposed medicine as more than technique and technology. It is about caring connections, human to human, about listening not only to the story of disease on the patient’s chart but also to his entire life story. In The Spirit of the Place, these relationships move beyond professional to family and community.

[End alternative paragraph]
Life’s fullness and flaws create the spirit of this place that is Columbia, a place that is, as damaged but undaunted town historian Miranda Braak tells it, one of “breakage and resilience.” Whatever can go wrong in Columbia will go wrong, including its people. It is the town joke, and, until Orvy comes to better understand the phenomenon that is the shared human journey, he mistakenly believes it makes a joke of the town to which he has been compelled to return.

There are echoes of previous Shem characters, themes and techniques, including pointed and poignant letters from a parent, in this case Orvy’s dead mother, who has found the perfect posting co-conspirator in Miranda. But Shem also has forged ahead into new terrain of the spirit that includes but goes beyond the medicine practiced by the sometimes bumbling but beloved town doctor who is Orvy’s inspiration, example and nominal partner in a small-town practice.

Though Shem’s characters in The Spirit of the Place are less singularly memorable than the Fat Man, House of God residentwhose rules and caring saved not only patients but also interns, these Columbians are richer, fuller and deeper, particularly Miranda, Selma and her granddaughter Amy and Henry Schooner, childhood bully with a grown-up golden veneer that only Orvy sees through. Even a clichéd, cinematic conclusion cannot diminish the connection a readers will feel with Shem’s characters – especially his surprisingly strong women.

In Return to The House of God: Medical Resident Education 1978-2008 (The Kent State University Press), Amy Haddad and other essayists addressing Shem’s work take him to task for treating women as dim, sexual objects. Their accusation fails to persuade. Even if The House were once a sign of the sexual times, Shem is no serial sexist. The strong women of The Spirit of the Place demonstrate with their lives (and deaths) that “maybe love is just not giving up on people.” Sam Shem never does.

Steve Love, a Hiram College graduate student, is a retired Beacon Journal chief editorial writer and columnist.

Master’s class and “The Spirit of the Place”

Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 3:59 PM
To: Stephen Bergman
Subject: a master’s class and “The Spirit of the Place”

Dear Steve,

I have just finished teaching a Master’s class where we had a wonderful time. The work for today was “The Spirit of the Place.”  All these students had read “The House of God” first.  They really loved talking about both novels, but I think we may be the first class to read and discuss “Spirit.”  You will meet all these students because they will be at the symposium.  I thought you’d like to know that I could hardly get a word in as they discussed Columbia, Selma, Orvy, Cray, Miranda, Bill, Henry, Milt, Amy, Penny.  Often the class broke out in loud laughter (as in the dynamiting of the ice fishing hole).  Other times everyone was sad and sober (as in Selma’s last letter and her last appearance to Orvy). They discussed the problems of keeping secrets and not revealing important truths. They were keenly aware of the transitions from anger and hurt to compassion and caring.  They saw Bill and Orvy in some ways as versions of Fats and Roy 20 years later.  They rejoiced in the 3-dimensional characters and the strong women. They recognized some local politician in Henry, and wholeheartedly believed that Orvy was being symbolic when he gave Henry the bird.

So congratulations, Steve.  When a class has this much enthusiasm for a book, it bodes well for its future.

Carol Donley
Co-Director
Hiram College Institute of Medicine and Humanities

With simple, elegant language, Samuel Shem captures ‘The Spirit of the Place’

By Laura Marshall, Special to The Berkshire Eagle

Sunday, August 17
“The Spirit of the Place, “by Samuel Shem
Kent State University Press, 334 pages

When Orville Rose was a 6-year-old kid back in Columbia, N.Y., he had an epiphany: He was connected to something larger than himself. It was something to do with the clouds floating by overhead; as they passed
him and went on to other places, he felt that inevitable click into a bigger world.

Thrilled, he ran indoors to share his vision with his mother. “Something else!” he shouted. “Mom, I’m part of something else!”

And his mother, Selma Rose, gave a withering sigh. “Orville-doll, there’s nothing else but this.”

And that was the beginning of Orville’s flight.

At the opening of “The Spirit of the Place,” the latest, heartbreakingly beautiful novel from Newton author Samuel Shem, it is 1984 and 40-year-old Orville has returned to Columbia after years and years away.

He’s been running for a long time, looking for something greater than himself, something outside himself, something better than what he sees in Columbia and what he calls, with distaste, Columbians. Now a physician, he has seen the world with Doctors without Borders; he has tried on the life of a wanderer and found it to his liking; and he has discovered love dressed up as an eccentric, bewitching New Age yogi
who spouts just enough enlightenment to keep him confused.

But nothing he has seen out in the world has prepared him for what he finds back at home.

Orville has come back for his mother’s funeral, but because of his rootless existence his sister’s letter with the details of the services was delayed weeks in reaching him and he has missed it.

When he hears about his mother’s will, he wishes he had missed his flight back to the United States. For she has left him everything — her house, her car and $1 million — on one condition: that he stay in Columbia and live in his boyhood home for exactly one year and 13 days from the date of his arrival in town.

At first, Orville balks. Not even the money can keep him there, in what he sees as a kind of backwater cesspool, full of horrible memories. Everywhere he goes, people know him and he knows them, and
that’s exactly what he doesn’t want.

Life, however, gets in the way. First, his sister says he can’t see his niece if he doesn’t intend to serve his term, and Orville and 11-year-old Amy are kindred spirits. So he sticks around for a few days to see if Amy’s mom won’t soften up a little.

Then he visits his former mentor, Dr. Bill Starbuck, the town doc, who patches up the locals with the snake oil he calls “Starbusol.” Turns out the octogenarian wouldn’t mind an extra hand dealing with the
bumps and scrapes and gunshot wounds the hamlet’s residents seem to get themselves into.

Then Orville gets a letter from his deceased mother, and it seems if he stays he’ll keep receiving them until his sentence is up. If he goes, well, he’ll never find out what she has to say from beyond the grave.

Then his mother starts appearing to him, flying around the ghostly, empty house and the dumpy little town. And boy, does she have a lot to say.

Then he gets a call from his beloved, whose name happens to be Celestina Polo, and Celestina Polo tells him she will be unable to join him in swampy Columbia as planned, as she has fallen in with a wealthy banker who plans to finance a yoga commune –oh, but she does adore him and cannot wait to see him again and if it is not to be now then perhaps someday.

And then, in the first shock of grief over losing Celestina, Orville meets a lovely single mother, a widow named Miranda. She’s the local historian, and they share a single sweet moment together on a rainy
afternoon. And that’s when things get complicated.

“The Spirit of the Place” is a rare ode to home, not only to finding a place in the world but to connecting with someone who feels like home. It’s a love song to history, global and national and regional and local and personal. It’s an essay on the power and fallibility of medicine, told by a doctor– Samuel Shem is the pen name of Dr. Stephen Bergman, who graduated from Harvard Medical School, had a private practice in psychiatry for nearly 30 years, and in 1978 published “The House of God,” a novel used in the curriculum of medical schools today. It’s the story of a man and his mother, the give-and-take of that relationship, the slow revelations that keep flowing between the two even with distance or time or death keeping them apart.

What makes the book so rare is its fragile beauty. Shem’s language is simple and elegant even as he delves into the essences of his characters. And he doesn’t shy away from their complexity –rather, he embraces it, allowing us to see them as whole, imperfect, impatient, reckless, uncertain, vulnerable, delirious, selfish, loving.

Orville and Miranda and her small son, Cray, are about as complex and real and fragile and beautiful as characters can be, and their story is uplifting in its unorthodox trajectory.

Because sometimes it’s not about connecting with something larger.

Sometimes it’s about just connecting.

Diversion Magazine Review

DIVERSION-REVIEW