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The Assembler Of Parts: A Novel (2013)

by Raoul Wientzen(Favorite Author)

4.06 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1611458919 (ISBN13: 9781611458916)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Arcade Publishing

review 1: I was profoundly disappointed with this book. As someone who has personal experience with children with birth defects, I was at first excited and moved that Wientzen features Jess, a child with Hilgar's syndrome, as his main character. Moreover, the entire book is set after the child's death as she watches the story of her life on videotapes that God brings to her in a certain purposeful order. The setting, I thought, was extremely inventive and the characters powerful and complex, including Jess, whose disabilities mask an intelligent, creative, and philosophical mind.At about the halfway mark, however, when Jess dies (an unexpected moment in the course of the main story, even though the reader has known of its approach from page one), the book gets hijacked by an agenda-... moredriven morality tale that I found bordered on offensiveness. It turns out--and this is also foreshadowed in the first half of the novel--that the cause of Jess's death had to do with yet another physical problem that should have been diagnosed but wasn't due in part to her doctors' negligence. Suddenly, instead of focusing on the aftermath of Jess's passing, the plot devolves into a painfully dogmatic account of how fighting for "justice," in the form of financial compensation, is bad and will destroy your family unless you forgive your child's doctors, even if they've consciously tried to mislead you and cover up their incompetence. You can practically hear Wientzen, who is himself a pediatrician, shouting "Tort reform! Tort reform!" behind all of Jess's eloquent afterlife speeches about how the only route to healing after loss is to let go of all blame (including, apparently, the culpability of those who botched your loved one's health care). The attorney that Jess's parents hire to plead their case is a stereotypical greedy trial lawyer, complete with weasel-like features, and his slick attempts to earn as much money as possible off of Jess's dead body turns the bereaved couple into a pair of bumbling, mendacious idiots. (Because, you know, a working-class mother and father couldn't possibly have enough intelligence to escape being coached into perjuring themselves on the witness stand). This is flat-out insulting to anyone who's ever seen how the actions of careless doctors can and do ruin people's lives. Frankly, if my child's medical team ever acted the way Jess's doctors do in Wientzen's novel, I wouldn't want them to simply waltz away and face no consequences for their actions. Wouldn't that mean the same doctors could cause similar damage to another child and her family? Is forgiveness what's on offer here or a complex rationalization for failure?
review 2: I did not like this book. It wasn't that it was poorly written (in fact, I thought many parts were beautifully written), or that the main characters were irritating (quite the opposite), or anything like that; I just found this book to be deeply upsetting. We know from the premise that Jess is narrating from the afterlife, so her death itself is not surprising, but the aftermath and everything that follows her death is extremely distressing. I think this book presents an important truth in the end, but it's a really hard pill to swallow. less

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