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“The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor”
by Allan Gurganus
from the May 4, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″ text_color=””]I[/fusion_dropcap] love it when I’m introduced to an author who has been working for decades, particularly when they have such an interesting back catalog. Allan Gurganus’s name was completely new to me before “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor” was published, but I see he started publishing 1989 with his novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. He has one other novel to his name — 1997’s Plays Well With Others — but there appears to be another forthcoming, this one tantalizingly titled The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church. Clearly Gurganus has a voice, at least when it comes to titles. He also has three short story collections out, with another forthcoming.
But let’s look at his history with The New Yorker. This is his fifth story they’ve published, but the first was clear back in 1974 (“Minor Heroism”). The most recent was in 2004 (“My Heart Is a Snake Farm”), so I may have read it, though I don’t think so as I have no memory of the title or, as I said before, Gurganus’s name.
On to “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor”! I hope it’s excellent, and I hope to hear your thoughts. I’ve got it ready to read, and I hope tomorrow affords me some time for just that. I think it will! I hope you are all having a wonderful week.
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1974?? Long old time ago!
I turned to this site hoping to read many comments about this story and am surprised to be only the second to comment on what I think is the best New Yorker story I’ve read in quite a while. I applaud The New Yorker for publishing this now in the Covid epidemic because the story offers something without simply being an obvious parallel. In other words, it’s not JUST because it’s about an epidemic that it’s relevant.
What was so moving here is the idea of how memory, often abetted by archives or museums or the work of historians, can still inspire us. Here, the collectivism and social “undistancing” that the doctor in the story practices are revealed via a character who is a historian of sorts. The story is probably fictional itself, i.e. Gurganus is probably “making it all up” but this notion of community and charity which it tels is really nice to hear.
Also of note–the story starts off in the smart-alecky vein of what the narrator had once been like–a condescending urban hipster enjoying raiding the treasures of rural anitque and thrift shops. Then it too “pus away childish things” and becomes a long narrative told by Theodosia, a woman who owns an antique store about an 1849 cholera epidemic and Dr. Petrie who helped fight it, succumbed to it, and whose portrait is found by the narrator in Theodosia’s store. Her monologue completely shifts the tone and when we return to the narrator, all his smarm is gone and he’s learned something.
I’m very curious for some of the Mookse and Gripes’s stalwarts to chime in on this.
Good insights, Ken. I hadn’t read your comment before composing mine, but we agree on a lot (no wonder I liked it, ha!).
I liked this story. The tale of young Doctor Petrie demonstrated the long arc of the hero’s journey: doubt, acceptance, success, idolization, betrayal, martyrdom, idealization, then a gradual, taken-for-granted enshrinement, and a slow disappearance from the spotlight, although his good deeds live on. I loved Theodosia, her challenge to him with her silence and her dismissive comments, and the way the narrator rises to that challenge, taking a small step in his own heroic journey. Despite his condescension and commodification of the relics of the lives of the people who had lived through hard times, we see that he has some self-awareness, and a sharpness that allows him to drill through the owner’s wary aloofness and get to what’s important: the tale of the doctor’s modest selflessness and tragic end, given meaning by a woman who is pretty sharp herself. I liked the touch of the doctor tying himself to his death bed, not unlike Christ nailed to the cross, albeit of his own doing. Both an apocryphal history lesson and a parable, it educated and uplifted me.
I read “Minor Heroism” many years ago. I liked it. There was a symmetry and roundness to it — recognition of both the son‘s and the father’s sides of the conflict. And the tragedy of the dissonance between them.
This story was OK, but I did not like it a lot. Smoothly written, to be sure. But I had 2 problems:
First, so much was told in Theodosia’s narration. I like a story that plays out in front of the reader. Even in the history-laden frame stories that we just considered, “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” and “Bedtime Story”, I felt that past action was occurring in real time. Just my personal take.
Second, I didn’t find the young man’s conversion convincing. Too fast. As Ken wrote, after hearing the story about the young doctor “all his smarm was gone”. It’s not that easy, I don’t think.
So — I enjoyed reading, but I don’t give the story as high marks as Ken and Callie do.
One more comment — I like Ken’s word “undistancing”. The doctor undistanced and died. Theodosia “undistances” the past from the present. And the narrator may be undistancing — dropping his cynicism, which is a way of setting up distance. He will perhaps accept human closeness more readily now.
I also got sucked into this story once Theodosia took over and led us back into the past and to that tragic story. I’m still trying to unpack it, because I do think there was a lot going on. William points out one of the complexities of the story: the doctor is all for the community coming together, even at this time, but it kills him. Furthermore, the community comes together against him, for a time, since he, as a newcomer, is an easy scapegoat (and maybe, honestly, he was taking the disease around to people who otherwise would not have caught it). But ultimately the story still cheers him on and presents him as a tragic hero, more for his ideals, I think, and his courage and hope, than for his practical knowledge.
Callie, I really like your description of what happens to Dr. Petrie in the community once he’s gone. A lot of this reminded me of some things Alice Munro explores in her fiction, and I could certainly see those medical tools coming to play in one of her stories as she brings the past to life while showing how much is actually, or at least practically, annihilated.
Ken’s and Callie’s observations are spot on. I was captured by the story and especially loved the uniqueness and eccentricity of the shopkeeper. Many years ago I read a story contained in “White People” and was very impressed. I think that I seriously need to dip into Gurganus again soon!