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I can't be the one to come and save her
My three-day headache has been diagnosed as idiopathic trigeminal neuralgia, "idiopathic" in this instance signifying "nuke it from orbit and hope it doesn't come back." I am in favor of this plan, since I need more chronic facial pain like I need a literal hole in the head. In the meantime, I have spent a remarkable amount of time trying not to let my face freeze to a cold pack.
Mary Roberts Rinehart's K. (1915) is what used to be described as simon-pure melodrama right down to the last-minute twists and near-misses and nick-of-time revelations, but it's also a surprisingly detailed portrait of the nursing profession in the U.S. circa 1913–14, or at least surprisingly until I learned that Rinehart herself had graduated from what was then the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses in 1896 and was married to a doctor at the time of writing. The enigmatic title refers to the alias of one of the protagonists, who never does decide what name his assumed first initial should stand for: "Kenneth, King, Kerr—" He's the new lodger of a working-class boarding house who has obviously to the reader with the advantage of third person omniscient dropped out of his own life after some spectacular disgrace and I appreciate that unlike almost every instance of this trope I have encountered, no one on "the Street" ever thinks of him as mysterious, tragic, romantic, etc.; he is accepted so naturally as a clerk at the gas office and a jack of all trades around the house, "watch-dog, burglar-alarm, and occasional recipient of an apostle spoon in a dish of custard," that it is rather deflating to him to realize that he's seen as a placidly reliable character, a sort of universal older brother, especially by his co-protagonist for whom he has almost inevitably begun to carry a consciously hopeless torch. Because the plot kicks into gear when she begins her training as a probationer, the novel almost has the flavor of a school story, complete with rivals and romances and rites of passage like assisting at a first operation or witnessing—or almost causing—a first death, but as such it's reasonably mature. Medicine is presented as a sacred trust without letting the reader forget that sacred does not preclude exhausting, boring, upsetting, and not infrequently gross. I would award even more points to the book for realism if the romantic antagonist whose murderous jealousy derails several lives were not canonically half-Spanish. At least I find it hilarious that the other half is canonically New England, resulting in "Yankee shrewdness and capacity . . . complicated by occasional outcroppings of southern Europe, furious bursts of temper, slow and smouldering vindictiveness. A passionate creature, in reality, smothered under hereditary Massachusetts caution." Not everybody's from Boston, John. I found Rinehart through her much more famous detective novel Miss Pinkerton (1932) and its sequel, also medically-themed; I had been wondering some months ago about the trope of the butler who did it and apparently she can be credited with its invention. People interested in women writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, feel free to take note. Meanwhile, if you would like a decently idtastic romance-ish novel set in a teaching hospital right before World War I, K. has got you covered.
I can no longer remember who sent me this classical tweet, but I think it's funny.
Mary Roberts Rinehart's K. (1915) is what used to be described as simon-pure melodrama right down to the last-minute twists and near-misses and nick-of-time revelations, but it's also a surprisingly detailed portrait of the nursing profession in the U.S. circa 1913–14, or at least surprisingly until I learned that Rinehart herself had graduated from what was then the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses in 1896 and was married to a doctor at the time of writing. The enigmatic title refers to the alias of one of the protagonists, who never does decide what name his assumed first initial should stand for: "Kenneth, King, Kerr—" He's the new lodger of a working-class boarding house who has obviously to the reader with the advantage of third person omniscient dropped out of his own life after some spectacular disgrace and I appreciate that unlike almost every instance of this trope I have encountered, no one on "the Street" ever thinks of him as mysterious, tragic, romantic, etc.; he is accepted so naturally as a clerk at the gas office and a jack of all trades around the house, "watch-dog, burglar-alarm, and occasional recipient of an apostle spoon in a dish of custard," that it is rather deflating to him to realize that he's seen as a placidly reliable character, a sort of universal older brother, especially by his co-protagonist for whom he has almost inevitably begun to carry a consciously hopeless torch. Because the plot kicks into gear when she begins her training as a probationer, the novel almost has the flavor of a school story, complete with rivals and romances and rites of passage like assisting at a first operation or witnessing—or almost causing—a first death, but as such it's reasonably mature. Medicine is presented as a sacred trust without letting the reader forget that sacred does not preclude exhausting, boring, upsetting, and not infrequently gross. I would award even more points to the book for realism if the romantic antagonist whose murderous jealousy derails several lives were not canonically half-Spanish. At least I find it hilarious that the other half is canonically New England, resulting in "Yankee shrewdness and capacity . . . complicated by occasional outcroppings of southern Europe, furious bursts of temper, slow and smouldering vindictiveness. A passionate creature, in reality, smothered under hereditary Massachusetts caution." Not everybody's from Boston, John. I found Rinehart through her much more famous detective novel Miss Pinkerton (1932) and its sequel, also medically-themed; I had been wondering some months ago about the trope of the butler who did it and apparently she can be credited with its invention. People interested in women writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, feel free to take note. Meanwhile, if you would like a decently idtastic romance-ish novel set in a teaching hospital right before World War I, K. has got you covered.
I can no longer remember who sent me this classical tweet, but I think it's funny.
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That tweet is funny. If you like spiders and the Silmarillion, you may also enjoy (also with illustrations.)
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Commiseration appreciated and returned—I can't imagine I would be enjoying this any more if it were in my throat.
If you like spiders and the Silmarillion, you may also enjoy (also with illustrations.)
Thank you, that's amazing.
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You're welcome! I picked it out of her prolifically out-of-copyright bibliography because I wanted to know what was up with the title and was not disappointed.
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You're welcome!
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Thank you. Today seems cautiously improved, but I am terrified of blowing my nose or tilting my head and jinxing it.
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Thank you for the link to Archive.org; reflexively I checked Gutenberg as well, and they have K. also, indeed a string of Rineharts including Bab: a Sub-deb which I have a vague memory of having read years ago and which I shall now investigate, along with K.
I was reading distractedly (The morning battle cry "RRRAwaWOWOWrrAAA!" is very distracting) and mistook your description of K. for a silent movie. It sounds like it would have made an excellent one.
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Thank you.
Thank you for the link to Archive.org; reflexively I checked Gutenberg as well, and they have K. also, indeed a string of Rineharts including Bab: a Sub-deb which I have a vague memory of having read years ago and which I shall now investigate, along with K.
You're welcome! She's also at Faded Page.
Bab: a Sub-deb is a great title at least consonantally and if your vague memories are positive, I will check it out.
I was reading distractedly (The morning battle cry "RRRAwaWOWOWrrAAA!" is very distracting)
(Legitimately so. The morning routine of our cats involves fewer battle cries and more maneuvers, like climbing on one's face.)
and mistook your description of K. for a silent movie. It sounds like it would have made an excellent one.
It truly would. My fancasting for K. appears to be hovering between Richard Barthelmess and Clive Brook and I'm open to suggestions on Sidney. I know more pre-Code actresses than silent ones.
[edit] There were two! I have no idea of the caliber of either—and I don't know any of the leads—but since the first was directed by Lois Weber, I resent its being lost.
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*hugs*
Much appreciated. It seems to be starting to break, but I remain paranoid.
The book sounds really interesting, too.
I really enjoyed it! Intertwined with the melodrama which constitutes the beats of the plot, it turned out to have a lot of nicely observed and not obviously foreseeable emotional reality, which is, you know, not a combination I imagine you can in any way relate to.
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That classical tweet is great.
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Thank you. I think it is beginning to, but then I worry about encouraging it to come back.
That classical tweet is great.
It made me happy!
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Thank you. Much sympathy right back at you. I hope you have something that at least amends it.
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I know nothing about the Tish books: speak to me of them?
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That's really neat.
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That ethnically stereotyping quotation is so exactly what it is, wow. But the story sounds like a lot of fun if you do some mental editing at that point.
I'm glad to be reading this entry in the light of the follow-up entry, where I know you were able to get out for a walk. Sorry that you were told "idiopathic"--that always is a letdown. "Sorry, friend, you've, uh, got some neuralgia there; couldn't tell you why."
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Feel free to recommend! Rinehart also seems to be credited with the first-person foreshadowing device called somewhat dismissively "had-I-but-known," without which we get none of those evocatively withholding noir narrators who tell us that something bad was already on its way, but not what it was until it gets us. I think of it as a very pulp technique, so I'm delighted to find it came in from more literary crime novels. It's present in K., but less in a plot-pointing way than in a way that isolates emotional significance: "For some curious reason, in the time to come, that was the way Sidney always remembered K. Le Moyne—standing in the little hall, one hand upstretched to shut off the gas overhead, and his eyes on hers above." So the reader wonders what is so important about that gesture or that moment, what he revealed about himself, what she was picking up. I didn't find it obtrusive.
That ethnically stereotyping quotation is so exactly what it is, wow. But the story sounds like a lot of fun if you do some mental editing at that point.
In fact, if you skip that page, you don't lose anything because it's not as though the text is continually referring back to it!
I'm glad to be reading this entry in the light of the follow-up entry, where I know you were able to get out for a walk. Sorry that you were told "idiopathic"--that always is a letdown. "Sorry, friend, you've, uh, got some neuralgia there; couldn't tell you why."
Thank you.
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Agreed: hindsight is a staple feature of narration after the fact, sketching the premise is an excellent way of hooking the reader, I am confident I've seen contrafactuals all over Dickens. I was reponding to the fact that Rinehart's use of the technique has so far not come off as clunkily as the name suggests. It struck me as a normal kind of time-shifting, the narrative knowing more than the characters in the moment do.
[edit] I meant to return to this comment two nights ago, but my week has been my week: re-reading Allingham's Death of a Ghost (1934), I discovered there's an entire chapter that's almost constantly had-she-but-known; even Campion gets at least one instance. I was charmed to see it.