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In this story of love, loyalty, and unimaginable sacrifice set during the American Civil War, a doctor struggles to balance the passions of youth with the weight of responsibility.
The Civil War is but the noisiest of the struggles that the ambivalent hero of this historical novel wants to distance himself from. In 1862, at age 17, John Muro is packed off from Lynchburg to the University of Virginia Medical School, a berth that exempts him from the Confederate draft. Thanks to a flood of casualties, he's soon promoted to full-fledged doctor at the local military hospital, where his sense of detachment helps him deal with the carnage of war-and spills over into the rest of his life. He coldly repudiates his family after their textile mill fails; he's so inattentive to his beautiful girlfriend, Lorrie, that she has to browbeat him into courtship; and his best friend is a wounded Union POW who awakens John's longing to head North. John appraises the world with a clinical mindset ("Her affect, surprisingly, was like that of a patient suffering from one of the tropical fevers" he observes during his first kiss with Lorrie) that excuses his passivity and irresponsibility. Debut novelist Taylor recreates the detail-if not always the spirit-of the Confederacy's Victorian language and culture. But as John struggles to avoid entanglement with the (often underdeveloped) characters around him, his coming-of-age saga remains uninvolving. (Apr.)
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Lorraine Fitzsimons
reviewed The Disagreement on April 09, 2008
The Disagreement
A charming first novel on a fascinating topic--what was it like to be a first year student at the University of Virginia, interested in a career in medicine, in 1861? The chapters are many and usually quite short, so it reads a bit like a screenplay with dialogue rather than a more conventional work of historical fiction. I found myself caught up in the drama of the characters' lives, and the hero's girlfriend and college roommate were both intriguing in their capabilities and activities. The most interesting components for me were the description of the situation for the patients in the university's emergency hospital wards, wounded or suffering soldiers, and the strategies the staff adopted to cope as wartime made medical supplies increasingly scarce. The epilogue suggests what happened to all central characters from the vantage of many years later, and for some reason brought to my mind both the end of the Harry Potter series and a biography on the artist Thomas Eakins I read many years ago--the former, because of tone and tying up loose ends, the latter for the inclusion of both Dr. Gross and oarsmen on the Schuylkill.
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