A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Death Committee - Noah Gordon

I’ve always been a sucker for soap opera. Not necessarily the daytime TV kind, although at various times of my life I’ve been a regular viewer of shows such as RYAN’S HOPE and THE EDGE OF NIGHT. I’m talking more about novels that were bestsellers in the Fifties and Sixties by authors like Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey, Henry Denker, Herbert Kastle, and Wirt Williams. (Other than Robbins and Hailey, there are some forgotten names for you. Maybe Robbins and Hailey, too, more than I’d like to think.) These novels were often about Hollywood, or fancy hotels, or the publishing business (usually bearing little resemblance to the real publishing business), or some other glamorous, high-pressure setting like, say, a big-city hospital.

Which brings us to THE DEATH COMMITTEE. I remembered reading this novel when it came out in 1969 and enjoying it, so I thought I’d give a try again. It’s pure soap opera, centered around the life and loves of three doctors in a Boston hospital, following them from one summer to the next. Along the way there are flashbacks to fill in the histories of the main characters, as well as a framing sequence involving the Death Committee of the title, which meets whenever a patient dies unexpectedly to find out what went wrong and who is to blame.

This book is really dated in one respect. Nearly all the doctors are men, with female characters relegated to playing wife/girlfriend/nurse/patient roles. You can’t blame a book for being a product of its time, but in this case it does seem to limit the dramatic possibilities quite a bit. But the writing is very clear and direct, with hardly a literary flourish to be seen. Everything goes to the service of story and character, which is not a bad thing as far as I’m concerned. Gordon keeps the pace perking along with plenty of complications, and I can see why I enjoyed it forty years ago. It’s just a good, involving story, well-told.

If you’re a fan of ER or GRAY’S ANATOMY, you’ll probably find a lot that’s familiar in THE DEATH COMMITTEE, though the novel is, of course, a lot more old-fashioned than those shows and lacking in the bizarre quirks that show up so often on GRAY’S. Some modern readers might find it a little too slow, but if you’re looking for a nice hefty chunk of former bestsellerdom, give THE DEATH COMMITTEE a try. 

(This post originally appeared on November 13, 2009. When I looked it up, I was a little surprised to see that THE DEATH COMMITTEE is available in an e-book edition on Kindle Unlimited. If you have KU and want to give it a try, I found it a pretty enjoyable book. Some of Noah Gordon's other novels are on KU, as well. Might be time to give one of them a try.)

Forgotten Books: The Office - Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown is best known for his science fiction and mysteries, of course, but he also wrote one mainstream novel, and it’s now available in a 60^th anniversary edition that came out late last year. THE OFFICE, published originally by Dutton in 1958, has some autobiographical overtones—the office boy narrator is named Fred Brown—but as Jack Seabrook points in his afterword to this edition, the novel is almost completely fictional. It’s the story of the eight people who work in the office of an industrial jobber in Cincinnati, a company that sells supplies to machine tool manufacturers. That’s it as far as the plot goes, just the stories of these everyday people and what happens to them over the course of two years in the 1920s.

THE OFFICE is a very old-fashioned novel and reads at times like it was written in the Twenties instead of taking place then. The narrator is very omniscient, taking part in some scenes but knowing everything there is to know about others that take place when he’s nowhere around. The pace is very slow, the plotting mundane (except where it takes a couple of lurid turns late in the book), and Brown doesn’t just break the rule about showing and not telling, he demolishes it. This book is all about telling and revels in it.

The thing is . . . man, he had me turning the pages. After the leisurely build-up, I raced through the second half of this book, compelled to find out what was going to happen. I credit Brown’s skill in creating these characters for that. Yes, there’s not much that’s out of the ordinary about them, but he does a masterful job of showing that every ordinary life is filled with its own drama and suspense. And in showing that, he creates some very poignant scenes.

You know me, I love action. What little there is in THE OFFICE takes place off-screen. Doesn’t matter. I thoroughly enjoyed this book anyway. It was a labor of love for Brown, who worked on it for years in between writing other things. It was also, not surprisingly, his least successful book as far as sales. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best book I’ve read in a while, and I give a very high recommendation.