WICKETT'S REMEDY - Myla Goldberg - Fiction

It's a good thing that the dead are around in Myla Goldberg's novel, supplementing the text with David Foster Wallace-style sidenotes giving their charming and often befuddled recollections, because otherwise this book would be depressing as hell. With a death toll admittedly appropriate for the time (the 1918 flu pandemic), there are still four primary characters felled in rapid succession, of an above-the-line cast of perhaps three times that many. The first death, that of Lydia Kilkenny's earnest and wonky husband, Henry, comes as a striking blow to a narrative constructed around the couple's quest, after Henry drops out of med school, to concoct and market a flavorful tonic designed to cure illness by the force and wit of its accompanying letters of introduction. Lydia shows promise of blossoming into a businesswoman, and Henry comes out of his shell as he realizes the import of his talent with words.

Then Henry dies, immediately and as a result of a bout of what we will later learn is the deadliest influenza ever to blanket the world. Her entrepreneurial hopes cast aside, Lydia turns the reigns of their operation over to Quentin Driscoll, who, as the text has been preparing us for continuously, is to turn the false medicine into a real soft drink sensation. Perhaps the weakest part of the novel, the intercut newsletter (the QDispatch) and press releases from various arms of QD soda are so obviously false and cloying and twee that I instantly disliked Quentin Driscoll, despite the text's attempt to paint him as an up-and-coming young man who inspires confidence and awe in Lydia from their first--and unfortunately only--meeting. This plot putters on, showing us an aged Quentin Driscoll who has stolen the recipe for QD Soda from Lydia without providing her their agreed-upon royalties, and only fesses up when he is about to turn the business over to Ralph, a delivery boy who has risen through the ranks to gain Driscoll's favor. Of course, he also gains Driscoll's favor for sharing the name of Driscoll's deceased son, the victim of, perhaps, a suicide at sea on the part of his mother, Driscoll's last and best love. Now, none of this happens in scene; we hear of it all through imagined newsletter correspondences written by Ralph in quite an ass-kissing tone. The plot is interesting enough to make me want to hear more about it, but aside from these chapter-ending missives, we are given nothing at all to continue this plotline.

Instead, with her brother killed immediately after shipping out for the war, and her neighbors half felled by flu, Lydia discovers that her true calling is nursing, and answers a newspaper ad to be a nurse (or, really, a nurse's aid) at an island of medical experimentation designed to demonstrate how the flu is transmitted (in a cute exchange of anonymous dialogue bookending two chapters, two patients argue over "whether influenza is really bacterial at all!" Of course, as we now know, it is a virus.) On the island, Lydia meets the man who is to be her next husband (again, a fact we only know second-hand through the voices of the dead and these end-of-chapter text selections; can't we have anything in-scene in this novel besides death?) and comes to terms with the grotesqueries of attempting to infect navy deserters with the flu in exchange for commuted sentences.

The novel does a masterful job engaging the reader with the importance of language and friendship in curing disease, and paints a wonderfully vivid picture of 1918 Boston, and particularly Southie. In the end, though, it feels like two novels--one about Lydia-as-entrepreneurial-medicine-saleswoman, and one about Lydia-as-influenza-nurse, and although Lydia's transformative moment, a day as a volunteer at an overrun hospital, is beautifully written, the fact remains that the narrative is held at a joint, and hinges the reader's attention in an ultimately dissatisfying way.