On a spring day, a doctor whose aging father died when he was a young teenager decides to visit the doctor who cared for his father but lost him to congestive heart failure. For the previous few days, the young doctor has confronted many of his own demons as he treats cardiac patient George Dittus, not a mirror image of his father but close enough to bring out his own insecurities, especially when he mis-doses Dittus, who almost dies. What marks this novel, however, is not the story, which is less than consequential. Stein (Probabilities, Permanent, 1995) is a doctor as well as a novelist; his strength resides in the medical insights he brings to his writing, an existential drama with overtones of Camus though without that author's absurdism. The powerful, anguished, evocative prose of Stein's second novel is not to be missed; he brings to his fiction the vividness and immediacy of a memoirist.
