The Laws of Invisible Things

Rating:
Summary: Existential medical writing
Review: Frank Huyler's debut novel, The Laws of Invisible Things, is a wonderfully successful amalgam of elements not often found conjoined in today's literary fiction: stark, ultra realistic depictions of both mental and physical reality, melded with a touch of existential despair and touched with faintly religious undertones. A young doctor, Michael Grant, is confronted with the medical's profession's most fightening possibility: that somehow he has done less than he could for a patient who eventually dies. His own private and innate existential pessimism mixes slowly with the fear that his "failure" shall cost him in ways that he only dimly understands: will he be somehow diminished in the eyes of his colleagues, in the eyes of relatives of the victim, in his own eyes? This subtle mixture of emotions is conveyed in prose that could arguably be called 'chekovian' in its stark, understated, beautifully wrought simplicity. The novel evolves slowly and very surely into a sustained search for the cause of the mysterious disease that kills his patient and eventually infects the doctor himself. Is it a new disease, that rarest of occurences, one that would bring an oxymoronic fame to the doctor? Is it really a disease of the body? Frank Huler's immense gifts as a miniaturist blossom in the broader reaches of the novel with telling and impressive effect. A smashing debut effort.

Rating:
Summary: A Real Page Turner .....
Review: I'm not usually a fan of male authors but read this book on a whim. The topic of an unusual disease peaked my interest and I thought I might be able to relate to topic. Having a child with a rare disease keeps me open to reading anything whether fiction or non-fiction that is along those lines.

This was beautifuly written in a slightly eerie kinda way. It read so smoothly and was a true page turner. Several times, I caught myself on the edge of my seat. The character development was wonderfully done. No stones were left unturned.

As a fair warning, for those with a weak stomach, there are several very graphic medical scenes. Frank Huyler did a wonderful job at describing them in such a thorough manner and the words just come off of the pages. Please don't let this stop you from reading this amazing story. You will see, the graphic scenes are well needed to get a crystal clear picture of all that's involved.

Rating:
Summary: Cuts Like a Knife
Review: In this subtle yet powerful work, Frank Huyler crafts a finely tuned novel that should be on every M.D's short list of relevant fiction. In contrast to the overly wrought melodramas so frequently proffered in the area of Medical Fiction, Mr. Huyler presents the reader with a thorough, insightful, and heretofore unarticulated understanding of the doctor/patient relationship and its attendant complexities. Going beyond prosaic medical school treatment of a physician's duty in a world of disease, Mr. Huyler touches on, and ultimately examines, the re-occurring themes of patient care and a physician's own shortcomings. Stained with nuance and creative restraint, Mr. Huyler blends mystery, disease, religion, and human frailty to powerful effect. A must read for those interested in both the body and the mind.

Rating:
Summary: "He began to feel the ache, the blinking wonder of survival"
Review: This is a somber, disturbing, yet quite beautiful novel. Huyler mysteriously weaves the worlds of spirit, faith and physical suffering into a dreamscape type narrative that is at once beguiling, and at times totally horrific in its depiction of the frailties of the human body. I can't say that I enjoyed this novel, but I did appreciate Huyler's lucid and lyrical prose as he brings together the threads of what it means to be a physician in the world of individual disease and infection.

The narrative focuses on three men: two physicians Michael Grant, Ronald Gass, and one man of faith, the Reverend Williams. Michael has just joined Doctor Gass's practice when a young girl in his care inexplicably dies; Ronald tells Michael that he didn't do enough to help her. When the Reverend Williams brings to Michael the girl's Father, Jonas as a patient, Michael takes him on and soon learns that he has a strange illness, which manifests itself in tiny white spirals on the back of his throat and in his eye. After Jonas meets a fiery death in his house trailer, Michael releases he has also caught the disease when he finds one tiny white line in the back of his throat uncoiling from behind his left tonsil. As illness begins to consume him, he begins to gather evidence about the disease, and at the same time, he is enigmatically drawn into a love relationship with Nora, Ronald's daughter.

Michael, recently divorced and living in a self-imposed state of seclusion, begins to question his life, work and the world around him. He feels the "weight of profundity without its content" - the world has become fixed and hard around him. And as he gets sicker he dwells on his past, when he lived as a young man, keen-eyed, full of passion, knowledge, and full of faith in "the laws of invisible things." For Michael there is only one serpentine thread, one line at the back of his throat, so he has only one path to follow, but for Jonas there were many threads - many paths to follow. Jonas left the faith, lost his innocence and became part of the disillusioned "underworld."

Michael is plagued by dreams of the underworld, a place where things do not make sense, a place of patterns and forces just beneath the surface of the everyday. He ruminates on people's lives and their faiths, and the unbroken laws of the universe and the cycles that keep continuing out of conscious thought and entirely out of conscious reach. And he questions the role of medicine and the act of unquestioningly peering through the world with an electron microscope examining specimens " the flesh of birds, of animals and children, the bloody entrails of mosquitoes" hoping to see clearly when all is just another "match struck in the underworld." We think of life in circular terms but instead we get an uneven line, and nothing ever circles back and becomes whole as we know it should.

Huyler's experiences as an emergency physician really show, as there are some horrific moments in this novel, particularly in one scene when one of the main protagonists suffers a devastating heart attack. The pain, and anguish is quite distressing in its authenticity. Similar to Michael Cunningham's The Hours, the Laws of Invisible Things is a powerful, resonant and almost existential meditation on life, death, suffering and the loss of faith. This is an introspective, meditative and quite powerful piece of work. Mike Leonard April 04.

Rating:
Summary: The Laws of Invisible Things
Review: Without going into elaborate detail, I find it necessary to report that this book is NOT one I would recommend to anyone. The protagonist Dr. Grant blunders about in a plotline that is so weak that Huyler fails to deliver a conclusion. This book goes absolutely nowhere, and I regret the time I invested in reading it through to the end. The blurbs promise a medical thriller like The Hot Zone or Darwin's Radio, but Huyler's novel is a paltry wanna-be. A doctor who writes a book can throw in a lot of medical jargon, but what he needs is a solid plot -- not one based on "invisible things!"

Rating:
Summary: An Impressive First Novel from a "Literary Doctor"
Review: You need not have read Frank Huyler's THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS to know that there is something lyrical in the practice of medicine, but it helps. You need only to have watched television's E.R. to understand that, amidst the technical terms and the clipped jargon, there is something about the urgent rhythms of an emergency room that approaches, well, if not poetry, then something not too far removed from it.

Huyler is a doctor, and a poet, and knows how the two disciplines intersect. His first novel is set in the medical world, but sends out long, serpentine feelers into the realm of poetry. THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS concerns Dr. Michael Grant, a recent arrival to North Carolina, trying to settle down in a new city and a new practice. But disturbing things keep happening, one right after the other, all of them interrelated by one mysterious secret.

There is, first of all, the little girl whose death we learn about in the opening pages. One moment, she is in Dr. Grant's office, sitting on her mother's knee, with a fever --- nothing that looks too serious, nothing that can't be controlled with the proper treatment and, perhaps, a lollipop. Hours later, before a diagnosis is made and before antibiotics can be administered, she is dead. There's a word for it ---meningococcemia, caused by an invisible microbe, obedient only to its own laws. But the word itself means very little in isolation and the child is dead for all time, and Dr. Grant must carry that fact with him like a heavy burden.

That burden is heavy because of a possible slip-up in diagnosis that may or may not have been fatal; nobody can know. But it is specifically heavy because of the presence of two authority figures watching over Dr. Grant. One is his employer, the reserved and scholarly Dr. Gass, who doesn't trust Grant's judgment. The other is the girl's grandfather, a local preacher, who wants to make sure that Dr. Grant wasn't at fault in her death.

The grandfather's concern leads him to make a request --- that Dr. Grant treat his son, the father of the dead child, for an unspecified ailment. Dr. Grant finds that his new patient has frequent fevers, sees bright lights and is regularly confused. Grant, too, is confused by the case, and can find no cause for the sickness or its bizarre symptoms.

This makes THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS sound like a medical mystery, with a dedicated doctor seeking out the tracks of a dreaded new disease. But the mysteries Huyler is chasing are primarily mysteries about how people behave, how they react to loss and disappointment and heartache. Dr. Grant is alone, adrift after the collapse of his marriage, largely indifferent to his craft when not completely oppressed by it. The cold, chilly Dr. Gass is trapped in an unvarying routine of professionalism and competence, unwilling or unable to seem anything less than the man in the starched white lab coat. The preacher and his son are filled with doubt and guilt about the spiritual gulf that separates them. Just as the invisible, unknown specter of "Grant's Disease" winds its threads through the bodies of its victims, the threads of loneliness and sorrow wrap themselves around the characters.

Huyler's spare, meticulous prose passes light through his characters like an X-ray, at times illuminating the dark corners of the medical jargon and at times revealing the telltale shadows consistent with broken hearts. Huyler is a talented writer, with long, lyrical descriptive passages contrasting nicely with the shorter, choppier rhythms of dialogue. But it is the skillful handling of the medical prose that makes THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS memorable and establishes Huyler's niche as a literary doctor.

As one of Huyler's characters lies ill, he has Dr. Grant explain the mechanics of his illness, putting the mysterious chemical interactions of the body into tightly written prose and giving us the medical terminology. "They have a name for everything," a non-medical character explains. No, Grant thinks to himself, "they don't; they don't have a name for everything." Human medicine and human relationships have their invisible mysteries, and Huyler does an outstanding job in teasing them out and displaying them on the printed page.

--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds