Seventeen Interns, One Golk Joan Didion

There are, roughly, two ways to plot popular fiction. One requires the invention of some memorably racy character (say Scarlett O’Hara) who moves grandly and picaresquely across a large social landscape; the second, less demanding, involves gathering together a batch of halfcooked characters in some such critically foreshortened, supercharged situation as a) a frontier—Giant, Hawaii —b) a public disaster—The Rains Came, The High and the Mighty—or c) a hospital—Not As A Stranger, The Bramble Bush, and now, The Interns (Random House, $4.95), a second novel by a young man named Richard Frede (first novel: Entry E, about Godless Man at Yale) who may well find himself in possession of this year’s Major Medical Novel. And welcome to it.

As its title so evocatively suggests, The Interns has to do with the mad, sad, noble, ignoble, irrepressible activities of seventeen young interns in a city hospital where life is, needless to say, raw, meaningful, stripped bare of pretensions. (Which is more, incidentally, than can be said for The Interns.) Of the seventeen—most of whom bear surnames indicating that New North Hospital is (like battle detachments led by Audie Murphy or Frank Sinatra) a slice of American life—one goes berserk, one contracts tuberculosis, one has a wife who commits suicide, one performs criminal abortions, one gets the Call to O.B. (obstetrics, to those not addicted to hospital novels), and one, a Jew, divorces his adulterous Gentile wife to marry a colleague, Dr. Alicia Liu, who appears to be Chinese, although neither the intern nor Mr. Frede would dream of mentioning it. Everybody spends a good deal of time conferring on life, medicine, the quality of mercy-killing, why medical schools admit more Protestants than Jews, why General Motors trainees get paid more than interns, and the unfairness of things at large.

JD

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Joan Didion

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There are, roughly, two ways to plot popular fiction. One requires the invention of some memorably racy character (say Scarlett O’Hara) who moves grandly and picaresquely across a large social landscape; the second, less demanding, involves gathering together a batch of halfcooked characters in some such critically foreshortened, supercharged situation as a) a frontier—Giant, Hawaii —b) a public disaster—The Rains Came, The High and the Mighty—or c) a hospital—Not As A Stranger, The Bramble Bush, and now, The Interns (Random House, $4.95), a second novel by a young man named Richard Frede (first novel: Entry E, about Godless Man at Yale) who may well find himself in possession of this year’s Major Medical Novel. And welcome to it.

As its title so evocatively suggests, The Interns has to do with the mad, sad, noble, ignoble, irrepressible activities of seventeen young interns in a city hospital where life is, needless to say, raw, meaningful, stripped bare of pretensions. (Which is more, incidentally, than can be said for The Interns.) Of the seventeen—most of whom bear surnames indicating that New North Hospital is (like battle detachments led by Audie Murphy or Frank Sinatra) a slice of American life—one goes berserk, one contracts tuberculosis, one has a wife who commits suicide, one performs criminal abortions, one gets the Call to O.B. (obstetrics, to those not addicted to hospital novels), and one, a Jew, divorces his adulterous Gentile wife to marry a colleague, Dr. Alicia Liu, who appears to be Chinese, although neither the intern nor Mr. Frede would dream of mentioning it. Everybody spends a good deal of time conferring on life, medicine, the quality of mercy-killing, why medical schools admit more Protestants than Jews, why General Motors trainees get paid more than interns, and the unfairness of things at large.