With simple, elegant language, Samuel Shem captures
'The Spirit of the Place'

By Laura Marshall, Special to The Berkshire Eagle

Sunday, August 17
"The Spirit of the Place, "by Samuel Shem, Kent State University
Press, 334 pages

When Orville Rose was a 6-year-old kid back in Columbia, N.Y., he had
an epiphany: He was connected to something larger than himself. It was
something to do with the clouds floating by overhead; as they passed
him and went on to other places, he felt that inevitable click into a
bigger world.

Thrilled, he ran indoors to share his vision with his mother.
"Something else!" he shouted. "Mom, I'm part of something else!"

And his mother, Selma Rose, gave a withering sigh. "Orville-doll,
there's nothing else but this."

And that was the beginning of Orville's flight.

At the opening of "The Spirit of the Place," the latest,
heartbreakingly beautiful novel from Newton author Samuel Shem, it is
1984 and 40-year-old Orville has returned to Columbia after years and
years away.

He's been running for a long time, looking for something greater than
himself, something outside himself, something better than what he sees
in Columbia and what he calls, with distaste, Columbians. Now a
physician, he has seen the world with Doctors without Borders; he has
tried on the life of a wanderer and found it to his liking; and he has
discovered love dressed up as an eccentric, bewitching New Age yogi
who spouts just enough enlightenment to keep him confused.

But nothing he has seen out in the world has prepared him for
what he finds back at home.

Orville has come back for his mother's funeral, but because of his
rootless existence his sister's letter with the details of the
services was delayed weeks in reaching him and he has missed it.

When he hears about his mother's will, he wishes he had missed his
flight back to the United States. For she has left him everything —
her house, her car and $1 million — on one condition: that he stay in
Columbia and live in his boyhood home for exactly one year and 13 days
from the date of his arrival in town.

At first, Orville balks. Not even the money can keep him there, in
what he sees as a kind of backwater cesspool, full of horrible
memories. Everywhere he goes, people know him and he knows them, and
that's exactly what he doesn't want.

Life, however, gets in the way. First, his sister says he can't see
his niece if he doesn't intend to serve his term, and Orville and
11-year-old Amy are kindred spirits. So he sticks around for a few
days to see if Amy's mom won't soften up a little.

Then he visits his former mentor, Dr. Bill Starbuck, the town doc, who
patches up the locals with the snake oil he calls "Starbusol." Turns
out the octogenarian wouldn't mind an extra hand dealing with the
bumps and scrapes and gunshot wounds the hamlet's residents seem to
get themselves into.

Then Orville gets a letter from his deceased mother, and it seems if
he stays he'll keep receiving them until his sentence is up. If he
goes, well, he'll never find out what she has to say from beyond the
grave.

Then his mother starts appearing to him, flying around the ghostly,
empty house and the dumpy little town. And boy, does she have a lot to
say.

Then he gets a call from his beloved, whose name happens to be
Celestina Polo, and Celestina Polo tells him she will be unable to
join him in swampy Columbia as planned, as she has fallen in with a
wealthy banker who plans to finance a yoga commune — oh, but she does
adore him and cannot wait to see him again and if it is not to be now
then perhaps someday.

And then, in the first shock of grief over losing Celestina, Orville
meets a lovely single mother, a widow named Miranda. She's the local
historian, and they share a single sweet moment together on a rainy
afternoon. And that's when things get complicated.

"The Spirit of the Place" is a rare ode to home, not only to finding a
place in the world but to connecting with someone who feels like home.
It's a love song to history, global and national and regional and
local and personal. It's an essay on the power and fallibility of
medicine, told by a doctor — Samuel Shem is the pen name of Dr.
Stephen Bergman, who graduated from Harvard Medical School, had a
private practice in psychiatry for nearly 30 years, and in 1978
published "The House of God," a novel used in the curriculum of
medical schools today. It's the story of a man and his mother, the
give-and-take of that relationship, the slow revelations that keep
flowing between the two even with distance or time or death keeping
them apart.

What makes the book so rare is its fragile beauty. Shem's language is
simple and elegant even as he delves into the essences of his
characters. And he doesn't shy away from their complexity — rather, he
embraces it, allowing us to see them as whole, imperfect, impatient,
reckless, uncertain, vulnerable, delirious, selfish, loving.

Orville and Miranda and her small son, Cray, are about as complex and
real and fragile and beautiful as characters can be, and their story
is uplifting in its unorthodox trajectory.

Because sometimes it's not about connecting with something larger.

Sometimes it's about just connecting.

Shem,
It's getting close to midnight and I just finished your novel. I figure
you are in Costa Rica, but will get this when you return.

Let me say at once it is the most emotionally daring novel I know. It
dances out where no one else is willing to go. And it is very moving to
see your characters out there, taking such enormous risks--and all the
time knowing that YOU are the one taking them. I thought of Holden
Caufield saying that after reading out of Africa he wanted to call Isaac
Dinneson and complete the connection. Well, your readers should be
lining up to call you: and what a special treat to already know you and
have you for a friend. I'm thinking particularly here of the death of
Bill, the Doc. What an absolutely remarkable scene. Again, you dare to
let the tears fall--and they mean so much more coming from essentially
tearless people, people living behind a damn they pray will never crack.

This novel (like all art) shakes the ground and makes the cracks appear.
(variaotion on Kafka's art is the ax we use against the frozen sea
within us). Anyway, your remarks about connectedness did two things for
me. It reminded me of Jay Neugeboren's remarkable review in NY Review of
Books about six weeks ago, a book by a woman who was ONLY helped by the
talking cure, after decades of drugs. Jay has a brother who was helped
in the same way. Jay's conclusion is that what matters is not the
insight or the talk but simply THE CONNECTEDNESS, the sense that another
human being is in the same room, and cares. After Jay's review and your
novel, I had the same impulse: to call my own brother. And in both cases
I did (luckily he wasn't home).


--I'll tell you this: if he hadn't gotten off that train on the last
page (and I was already rationalizing things, saying, well, we can't be
sentimental, we have to be realistic, and all that stuff--but basically
Iwanted to kill him and his author) we'd have had our last calimari
together. Go back to that Italian gold digger? The phony of all time? If
I'd been wearing a hat tonight I'd have thrown it in the air; I'd
already shouted Hooray! And with what dignity does the retreating,
huddled family turn around, stand up, and then run to him.

All the relationships are excellent (though I am not sure I understand
why Miranda goes away--neither is she, I see at the end; nor did I know
why Orville gets on the train--and again, we see, neither does he) my
favorite in a way was Henry-Orvy. Henry is a great portrait. I'm such a
Christian, at heart, that I wanted to believe in his wish for
forgiveness and redemption. You MASTERFULLY kept me wishing and doubting
until the very end, and then never fully exploited either forgiveness or
punishment: he ended up a rich portrait of an appalling and yet all too
human being.

He, like so much else in the book, is a wonderful achievement

Congratulations, Shemie. I hope people are emotionally open to the
challenge that the Spirit of the Place presents them.

--Leslie Epstein, Director, Boston University Creative Writing Program,
author of KING OF THE JEWS and SAN REMO DRIVE.

Listen to the radio broadcast here:

http://multimedia.wbz.com/m/audio/20590638/the-spirit-of-the-place.htm

There is a great feature in this month's Chronogram Magazine about The Spirit of the Place.

The Spirit of the Place

Q&A with Dr. Stephen Bergman

by Lorrie Klosterman and illustrations by Annie Internicola, July 29, 2008

It is with three decades experience as a doctor and a penchant for storytelling that Stephen Bergman, MD, PhD (pen name, Samuel Shem), writes with wit and heart about both sides of the doctor/patient relationship. His highly acclaimed first book, The House of God (1978), continues to sell beyond the two-million mark and is today required reading at many medical schools worldwide because of its authentic depiction of hospital internship, the grueling year medical students must endure as they transition from textbooks to the real world of doctoring. Specializing in psychiatry, Dr. Bergman lectures widely at colleges and medical schools, and has also written the novels Mount Misery (sequel to The House of God) and Fine, the nonfiction book We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues between Women and Men, written with wife Janet Surrey and also penned with Surrey the off-Broadway play "Bill W. and Dr. Bob," the story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous (available on DVD).

READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2008/8/Whole+Living/The-Spirit-of-the-Place

"Samuel Shem is easily the finest and most important writer ever to focus on the lives of doctors and the world of medicine." This was the introduction that my host, Spence Porter, used at my talk at the Harvard Club of New York City July 23 and which he published in the Bulletin of the Harvard Club. It felt extravagant, to say the least. But it also made me feel that I've managed to write a few authentic novels, and a play, that have made their way in the world pretty well. THE HOUSE OF GOD, FINE, MOUNT MISERY, and now THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE (and the Off Broadway 2007 hit play BILL W. AND DR. BOB, about the relationship between Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon, and Bill Wilson, a stockbroker, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous) will have to speak for themselves. One of my spiritual teachers, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, wrote that "Arts and letters must both reveal and heal. To reveal means to show the true situation of people and society. To heal means to show ways to cure them." That's all I try to do.

A novelist is always worried before a reading that there will be no one there--my Law of Writers is "There is no humiliation beneath which a writer cannot go." But the crowd did turn out--some old friends--including a woman I knew when we were both children in "Columbia" (the town of THE SPIRIT) almost 40 years ago, and two cousins and medical students who told me that I am curfrently "the second choice of our class for commencement speaker next June, the first choice is Magic Johnson."

I spoke about the movement of my life as a doctor and the life of my characters from my first novel, THE HOUSE OF GOD, to my most recent one, THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE. I had in mind a recent review that said "THE SIRIT OF THE PLACE is a perfect bookend to THE HOUSE OF GOD," in that while the House is about medical training, the SPIRIT is about what you need to do to be a good primary care doc and a good person long after your training is finished. To illustrate this I read a scene of a woman with cancer who is dying in the first novel, and a scene from the Spirit where the old doctor who was the hero's mentor is dying. They are strikingly different, in terms of the ability of the hero of SPIRIT to "be with" the dying patient (which is what the hero of the HOUSE was told he had to learn, and did not). A spirited discussion followed, ranging widely over issues of all of my work,and I left there and walked out into the pouring rain in NYC and didn't feel a drop.

SAM

As a writer, I've had to learn what my best process is. I write when I feel like it--which turns out to be virtually every day. Over the years I've come to realize through bitter experience that I have to write a draft, put it away for a while, and then return to it. I don't seem to have to talent to just sit down and write it the first time. THE HOUSE OF GOD, in fact, went through seven drafts, and most of my novels, if I'd bothered to count them up, probably had about the same number.

The idea for THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE came to me around the bicentennial of the town I grew up in, Hudson New York. I had left town to go to college, and then my journey in the world took me to Harvard and Oxford and Harvard Medical school and though my family still lived there, I rarely went back. When I read about the history of the town in the bicentennial, I was amazed, All of a sudden I had answers to some of my childhood questions: I had always been told that Hudson, on the Hudson River, was a whaling port, and that whales were "caught in the river." A sea creature? A freshwater river? Also: why were the streets laid out as straight as Manhattan, why the Dutch names and the Quakers and why was there no Library until 1961! (Read the novel to find out the answers).

I began the book as an imagined autobiography--set in the Reagan reelection year, a pivotal year for American history, the first institutionalized reaction (turning far right) from what I had grown up with, in the '60s. The first draft was first person, and a remarkably long manuscript. I put it away and wrote other novels and the play BILL W. AND DR. BOB.

Many years later I went back to it, and made it into a real novel, a kind of imagined autobiography. Some characters are based clearly on real folk--like Blinky the Clown, the town drunk who marched in every parade, and Dr. Bill Starbuck, the town doctor, who, in real life and another name, served as a mentor to me to get me going into medicine. The story took shape fairly easily, riding on the feelings, and the visions, and the spirits.

The mother/son aspects had always been there; the specific other love story in the novel was new. Once I have a story and the characters, my job as an author is to sit There and listen carefully--they'll tell me what to do. If you believe in writing authentically, and not just writing for Hollywood or to sell books, you spend most of your time trying to get closer and closer to the real, to the authentic, to, yes, the spirit.

Once in a while you feel the tap of the Muse on your shoulder--for me, it was when I wrote THE HOUSE OF GOD and realized that the experience was so brutal that the only way it could work was if it rode on humor--as our lives in the hospital had done as well, to get us through. The first draft of THE SPIRIT took about a year, but it was a long book. Other drafts took less time. I know, as I know about my other novels, that this version is the best I can do for now. Tolstoy said that "the measure of an artist is the love he shows his characters," and I try to do that, every day.

A: When I was in college, studying premed, I thought that history was a
useless subject. Now I feel it is the most important subject to study. I,
like Orville, had no idea what my hometown's history was, and not only was
astounded that it was built in 1785 as a utopia, but also that the history
of the town formed me--all without my knowing it at the time. And so
everything you read about the history of Columbia--Quaker whaling port, town
of prostitution and gambling, town covered with cement dust that you needed
vinegar to scrap off your windshield, breakage--all of it is true. As much
true as possible: Miranda, a historian, tells Orville the story of a teacher
who asked each of her class to write down the weather outside. All of them
wrote down that it was a bright sunny day. The teacher wrote down: "It was
cloudy and terribly rainy all day long," and then held up her note and said,
"This is the one that will survive."

A: I'm glad you picked that up. A major theme in THE SPIRIT is the way
people appear as opposed to the way they are. This, of course, reflects the
genius of the Reagan and now Bush administration to--in th words of Carl
Rove--not be in the "reality based" community. Orville's mother Selma is
not such a great mom in private, but a great citizen of Columbia. Schooner
is the childhood bully that made Orville's life miserable, but when Orville
sees him again after twenty years he is, supposedly, the pillar of the
community, running for Congress, with contacts "in the basement of the White
House!" And of course in medicine, as Stabuck puts it, "As doctors, we're
the ones who get to lift up the lid and see the truth around here." Patient
tell the truth in the privacy of the office, and when Orville or Bill see
them in public, like at a party, the lies are how they get along. It's a
real challenge in our culture now, with spin, and Swift Boating and ouright
lies that are just being revealed five years later--but I think the American
people are catching on, and will vote for change.

Q: "Your novels THE HOUSE OF GOD, FINE, and MOUNT MISERY are all very "edgy"
books; THE SPIRIT seems less so. Is there a difference?

A: What motivates me to write are 'Hey wait a second!' moments--those times
during our daily lives when we find ourselves saying something or doing
something and we say, 'Hey wait a second,' I don't believe in this, why am I
doing it?'--and then we just keep going not paying attention to the
disruption. When enough of those Hey wait a second moments come together, I
feel that 'Somebody's got to write about this, it might as well be me. This
happened with my medical internship in THE HOUSE OF GOD, and with my
psychiatric training in MOUNT MISERY. And with psychoanalysts in FINE. THE
SPIRIT OF THE PLACE also is a response to these moments of outrage, but this
time the scope is more broad. There is always a political underpinning of
my novels, and HOUSE is set in the Nixon impeachment year (73-74) and THE
SPIRIT is set ten years later, the Reagan Revolution which, a reaction to
the 60s, set in motion the pulling out of the social safety net and union
busting and corporate greed and warmongering that has evolved to the idiotic
immoral mess that The Admninistration has now made of the world, and of our
economy. THE SPIRIT sees the effects ofof Reagan's cutting health program
in the patients the hero, Dr. Orville Rose, deals with. The town is being
hurt, his patients are being hurt, and he has to take care of them. The
other edge of the book is in Orville coming to terms with his ignorance
about his history, and the history of the small town he grew up in, and how
they go together. And of course since SPIRIT is a love story, there is an
edginess about love. And in his rough and tumbel relationship to his
mother, alive and dead. The themes are the universal themes in literature,
love and death, and redemption. All of my novels are about redemption.

Dear All,

Last night I appeared at the Harvard Bookstore in Harvard Square, Cambridge
Mass. It was a terrible night--blasting thunderstorms and gushing rains,
and Janet and I watched the clock tick down in the empty room thinking that
if two other people show up and we could find a deck of cards we could have
a game and go home. Once I had done a book appearance at a Borders store
and they had failed to take out an ad announcing my presence and I sat for
an hour in front of this huge pile of books--I believe it was my second
novel, FINE--and no one stopped, or even looked. Mothers ushered their
children past me quickly, as if I were a molester. The store manager asked
me six times if I'd like some coffee. From this kind of experience and
others I have coined my LAW OF THE WRITER: THERE IS NO HUMILIATION BENEATH
WHICH A WRITER CANNOT GO.

And then a miracle happened. The place filled up, so at the appointed hour
there was standing room only. The Shem fans and newcomers had arrived! I
was so relieved that I was relaxed, and as I read and talked and answered
questions I had the sense that I am getting a sense of what THE SPIRIT OF
THE PLACE actually is as a novel--not as my novel but a novel--what the
broader and deeper meanings are that an audience might be interested in.
From the questions I learned the answer to some of my puzzlement about the
book--realizing that while Orville comes back home as town doctor with the
job of trying to heal the town, the town has the job of trying to heal him.
Maybe obvious, but not to me until last night. And it was a homecoming of
sorts: twenty or so years ago my first major public reading was at the
Harvard Bookstore--and now it's up for sale.

What a thrill. Tomorrow I do a more difficult reading: an hour talk at the
Peter Bent Brigham Hospital at the Harvard Medical School, where my first
novel THE HOUSE OF GOD is still remarkably popular, and mordantly
controversial. Stay tuned.

SHEM

Dear All,

Just a quick report. I launched THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE on June 14 Flag Day
in the "place" it is set, my hometown of Hudson on the Hudson River. In a
town known for breakage there was none! Here is my report.

Going back home as a writer writing about going back home was the most
remarkable experience of my writer's life. The Opera House was standing
room only, and it was the first time I read out loud from the novel, and
people really loved it. As an introduction a guy I hadn't seen in 59 years
since we had made a reflecting telescope together for a science project
talked about it as a "focus" and gave me the book we worked from "How to
Make a Telescope." We sold a lot of books. The great thing was the Hudson
Book Club lady had somehow already read the novel in one gulp and was
ecstatic about it and said it was now gong to be read for the July
selection--another book club said the same thing. There were a lot of
hometown folk, but a lot of New Yorkers as well. Hearing it read gave me
confidence about doing that wherever in the future. In fact it sounded like
sounded in my head--what a surprise.

There was a great article on Thursday the 12th on the front page of Register
Star, withbook cover in color--great writing--the guy's a lit prof at SUNY Albany, a
moonlighter. Also a notice in another paper, giving the wrong day and time
for the reading. The only one who got it wrong and showed up just as it was
finishing was, as always happens, a depresssed vulnerable guy I knew who
was on industrial strength antidepressants.

Also, my interview with Alan Chartoff of WAMC Albany went extremely
well--he's smart and loved the book and said that THE HOUSE OF GOD was still
one of his three favorite books in the world but allowed how THE SPIRIT was "terrific."
He said it on air. He also said that when he does shows on books they jump
a lot on Amazon. He did a teaser for Saturday and the show itself will run
next Thursday or the one after. The reason it was so late an interview was
that it got lost in the pile on his desk.

The evening dinner sponsored by my old friends was an overload of nostalgia,
mostly with friends although with some NYrkers as well.
My father's dental assistants, who had been with him for 40 years straight (1946-
1986) were there--and bought books (The Spotty Dog sold them).
I just kind of got up and talked, and laughed--told the story of, as a high school kid,
going with some friends (in the room) out into the wilds of the county to a "loose woman's" house,
drinking with her in the front room, and then after a while she asking us 17year olds
if we would like to go into the back room and "see my pussy." We averred that we would.
We went into the back room and were met by a lion.
Not a stuffed lion. A real live big big lion. We saw it and ran.

That's all, that's it. It don't get any better than that.

Bottom line: everyone who has read THE SPIRIT loves it. The event was in
conflict with the annual Columbia County Hx Society gala dinner, which cut
into the crowds--but the president stopped by to make sure we met and said
he wanted me to come back in the fall to do an event with them--which I
shall.

Oh--Hudson's most glorious holiday is Flag Day, the same Saturday. Since
the parade was about to start as I was about to end, I read from THE
SPIRIT'S Columbus Day Parade and its breakage on pages 49-51 (the Chevy as
Nina Pinta bursting into flames) and ended the reading with the admonition not to
stand under lightposts, powerlines, or trees when the mayor begins to speak. The
only breakage my weekend there was that although clear skies had been
predicted by the Columbia weatherman, it was dark and rainy, so that when after dinner
we went out to the street to watch the fireworks, while there were loud
explosions from the riverfront there was no real light, and for all we knew
the BOOM BOOM BOOMS could have been disastrous collapsings and implosions
leaving many injured. But I didn't witness this. Just goes to show that
while writing for me is always fun, publishing occasionally can be as well.

SHEM
You can purchase the book online here:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Spirit-of-the-Place/Samuel-Shem/e/9780873389426/?itm=2