Summary

In Brigham Hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts, Anatole Broyard was reading The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. His roommate, a thug-type with a broken jaw and a drug habit had the television set and radio on at the same time and kept spraying sickening deodorizer. Broyard’s diagnosis was ambiguous with his oncologist guessing that he had a few years left to live. At this news the author burrowed deeper into Hazzards’s novel, relishing it’s beauty: to him, The Transit of Venus provided a cure that his doctors could not.

When he got out of the hospital his first instinct was to write a book about critical illness because he could find no nonfiction book that depicted it accurately. Indeed, he explains, very few works of great fiction do it justice naming The Death of Ivan...