In fiction, New Year’s Eve almost invariably proves a fiasco. Often it is tainted by doom or despair. In George Eliot’s novel “Silas Marner”, it prompts Squire Cass, a minor aristocrat, to host an opulent dance. His son Godfrey’s estranged wife, Molly, travels there, intending to expose his shabby behaviour, only to collapse en route and die in the snow. It is the date when Hans Christian Andersen’s little match girl (pictured) freezes to death in the street, ignored by revellers, and when the title character in Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” weds the dogmatic hypocrite Angel Clare. In Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Looking Glass”, a young woman falls asleep on New Year’s Eve and perceives a future so haunted by death that, when she wakes, the dream seems to have cast a pall over her whole existence.
After all, fighting a pandemic of severe pneumonia is what the ICU does best: even as so many patients could not be saved, still others made their way through the most arduous phase of this illness and survived, some with many years ahead of them. Each time that happened, I experienced the opposite of burnout—I was energized by the realization of just how miraculous intensive care medicine could be. Some of these patients I have followed up with, many months later, in my outpatient clinic, and while their lungs have not always fully healed, their lives are full and underway. In a strange sense, Covid showed us what the ICU was made to do. But today, as we envision health care in a post-pandemic world, we need to grapple more honestly with another reality; the ICU has a dark side too.
It’s light, as I said, for all the weightiness of its subject — but entertaining, nonetheless. And even so, Eliza reflects, “life had turned out to be more complex than even she, in her business, had expected.”
“We must live in the future we hope to make,” a character says at one point. Crewe is writing from that future; the book is cleanly contemporary in style. By doing so, he reminds us that the future we uneasily inhabit is almost as conflicted in its attitudes to sexual freedom as the late 19th century. He also reminds us how dangerous it is to reduce human life to manifestos. Lives and experience demand richer forms of storytelling, and this is just what Crewe has given us.
“Only connect!” Margaret Schlegel declares throughout E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” a mantra that doubles as the novel’s epigraph and a theme the literary eminence mined across his career, amid the twilight of the British Empire. The spirit of Forster broods over Tom Crewe’s lyrical, piercing debut, “The New Life,” which lends a contemporary urgency to an exploration of same-sex intimacy and social opprobrium.
Rudyard Kipling has been called the most controversial writer in modern English literature. Sometimes I suspect that Roald Dahl must run him a close second. Still, in the end, our dealings as readers aren’t with authors, all of whom are flawed human beings, but with their books. Our lives would certainly be poorer without Dahl’s tender portrait of the love between a father and his son in “Danny the Champion of the World” or the inspiring fairy tales of “The BFG” and “Matilda.” Even the critic Kathryn Hughes, who once called Dahl “an absolute sod,” concluded, quite rightly, that “despite so many reasons to dislike him,” he nonetheless remains “one of the greatest forces for good in children’s literature of the past 50 years.”