Bellevue

AUTHOR: Marc Siegel

PUBLISHED: 1998

GENRE: Fiction

Oh, where to begin.

“Bellevue” is a frantic, hyperkinetic novel, as jumpy as a coke fiend in need of a fix.  At the center of it is David Levy, a young medical school graduate showing up for his first day as an intern at Bellevue Hospital¹. Bellevue is an utter hellhole: a dirty, crumbling structure filled with the poorest of patients, an apathetic staff, and a complete lack of medical equipment or supplies such as, you know, morphine.  Or gauze.  It is a place you avoid at all possible costs, because if whatever lands you there doesn’t kill you, the dirty conditions or lack of attention will.  Bellevue’s crapitude is reinforced by the shining city on the hill, New York University Medical Center, located directly across the river.  Needless to say, the characters do a lot of pining in that direction.

Levy and his best friend Sal Vertino – who is, from the very beginning, a total douche bag, if you’ll pardon my French - have been assigned to Dr. Goldman, a chief resident.  Dr. Goldman (or, as he is commonly called to his face, “Fat Goldman”) is supposedly a well-respected and good doctor, but he treats his interns and his patients like utter crap, demeaning them in front of each other while swigging continuously from a two-liter bottle of soda.  Ten minutes into their first shift, Goldman has abandoned rounds and left Levy alone so he can go take a nap. 

While Levy struggles with his patients, Vertino and Goldman spend their time vying over mysterious medical student Delia Meducci. ²  By day two – day TWO! – Vertino is so smitten that he has stopped showing up for work, and Levy is forced to cover for him.  When Meducci dumps Vertino for Goldman (which happens off-camera, as does most of the driving action of this book), Vertino falls into a suicidal stupor and ends in Bellevue’s ER, feverish and disoriented, leaving Levy to find out what has happened to his friend – and what is really going at Bellevue.

Okay.  So maybe it doesn’t sound so crazy yet.  But you haven’t heard about the other sub-plots. Ready?  ‘Cause here we go:

 

1. The super-secret, super-scary “red liquid” study:  Conducted by everybody’s least-favorite boss Dr. Kell, who lurks in the background, finding comatose patients and hooking up bags of the “red liquid” to their IVs for his nefarious purposes.  In response, Levy and Goldman run around the hospital pulling down the bags and hiding their patients.  Kell, who eventually ends up shtupping – you guessed it – Delia Meducci, spends his free time trying to ruin both Levy and Vertino: Levy for interfering with his study, and Vertino for, well, being a douche bag.      
2. The witch of the Catskills – and I don’t mean a nasty woman: Vertino is convinced that he has been cursed by a witch. Yes, a witch, who Vertino believes has hexed his family for some long-forgotten slight.  And this man is supposed to be a doctor.  When Vertino suffers a tragic accident, Levy starts to wonder if the witch story just might be true.  (What’s that?  No, this isn’t supposed to be a supernatural thriller.  Why do you ask?)
3. Sally Wilson, everyone’s favorite no-nonsense, gets-stuff-done ER nurse:  Levy meets her while searching for Vertino in the ER.  Completely inexplicably, she agrees to not just go out with him, but to help him in his crazed quests.  She disappears after Levy starts shtupping – WAIT FOR IT! – Delia Meducci.
4. The bewitching minx herself: A medical student, Meducci doesn’t seem to do anything except sleep with people and then dump them, leaving the reader to wonder, who the hell is this woman? (Or, in the more poignant words of the late Heath Ledger, “what is it with this chick?  She got beer flavored nipples?”³)  She takes up immediately with Vertino, then switches to Goldman, then back and forth until Vertino goes crazy and drives his car into a guardrail (or was it the witch?) and Goldman goes from bully to kind-hearted mentor and moves to California.  She then takes up with Levy, who despite his attempts to resist immediately becomes obsessed and nearly screws up his entire residency, only to dump him later for Dr. Kell and his red liquids
5. The patients.  Oh, the patients:
   a.     Rulo, the wheelchair-bound Nostradamus of Bellevue: He spends his day wheeling around the hospital, trying to avoid Kell’s red bags of death.  In his free time, he makes prophetic statements and deep philosophical pronouncements.  And I don’t mean it’ll all be okay! assurances.  I mean the crow flies at midnight and the river will run red with blood type shit.  And Levy makes serious decisions based on them.
   b.    Lacombe, or, the Quiet Man: Levy’s first patient, he suffers from every ailment known to man, include the pesky problem of having no pulse and no breath sounds.  Only Levy can tell if he’s still alive or not, to the point that when Lacombe’s roommate codes, the nurses try to resuscitate the wrong man.  Levy’s very scientific method of determining Lacombe’s state of being is to feel if Lacombe is still warm. 
   c.     Mrs. Ruby, or, Sal Vertino’s only real contribution to this whole thing: Early on, Mrs. Ruby flat-lines and is brought back to life by Vertino’s quick thinking.  The other characters spend the rest of the book marveling about how she shouldn’t be alive!  Um, excuse me?  As opposed to the guy with no pulse?!?
   d.    The Biter: The Biter, well, bites, apparently in an effort to infect as many people as he can with the HIV/AIDS virus he carries⁴.  He is roommates with the comatose Lacombe, who is presumably unbothered by all that chomping.
   e.     The housekeepers: For comic relief – excuse me, “comic relief” – we have two union housekeepers who are on disability and thus get to stay in the hospital for free as long as they want, although why they would want to stay is beyond me.  They spend their days complaining about the food and throwing parties for the rest of the housekeeping staff, who, we are told repeatedly, don’t actually clean but rather leave memos around the hospital outlining what they plan on cleaning one day.  They end up in Kell’s red liquid study, which in my opinion is the most satisfying part of the entire novel.

I know it is hard to believe, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.  The story flies back and forth in between all these storylines in a feverish panic, confounding the reader as characters and plot lines disappear and reappear at a mind-boggling pace - Sal is at Bellevue!  No, he’s up in the Catskills.  No, he’s at Bellevue! Wait, where’s Sally? Oh, who the hell CARES!  It is beyond bizarre.

If the book had been sold as a mystery, or a paranormal thriller, or something, perhaps the reader wouldn’t be left to wonder if the author really believes that witches, prophesying patients, and super-secret, super-scary red liquid studies are commonplace.  But the book jacket bills the story as a stirring missive on the pain of becoming a doctor in the inner city.  And in the end, that just might be the most baffling part of it all.

LENGTH: 288 pages

MAINSTREAM OR NOT: Uh, no.

SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Are you sitting down?  If not, go ahead, I’ll wait.  Because I’m going to say yes.  If only for the sheer number of WHAT THE HELL? moments this story produces.  Honestly, you cannot understand the craziness until you experience it for yourself.

¹The author may well have established a time period for this.  I’m not sure.  It’s a definite possibility that I was so flummoxed by the crazy storyline that I missed it.  If I had to hazard a guess, I would go with the mid-to-late 1970s, when New York was too poor to pay its bills and arson became a perfectly logical way of getting out of a lease.  But I could be wrong.

²One of the other reviews I read referred to her as a third-year student.  I apparently missed this detail, or any other details about what she looks like.  Or what any of them look like, other than that Goldman is fat.  This is what happens when the reader spends all their time asking, what the hell is happening? instead of paying attention.  Also confusing is how they all relate to each other, work-wise – who’s reporting to who, what exactly each is supposed to be doing during the day, that kind of thing.  I’ll admit that the entirety of what I know about the whole med student-intern-resident process comes from Scrubs.  But – and this is truly inexplicable – the author is apparently a doctor himself, and thus would have first-hand knowledge of what being an intern is like.  So you’d think he could explain it a little better.

³10 Things I Hate About You is truly an underrated classic, although I could at first only remember the above-quoted line and not the movie it was from, forcing me to google “chick with beer flavored nipples”, which landed me on all sorts of interesting lists, I’m sure.

⁴Throughout the story, AIDS is referred to as the virus, complete with italics, which is annoying but does help to confirm that this is, in fact, supposed to be the mid to late ‘70s.