Book Review: Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures

It wasn't until medic Vincent Lam met Margaret Atwood on a cruise that he set sail on a new career

review by Noah Richler Times
February 22, 2008

INCENT LAM, JUST 33, has what many writers want. Not just nominations, prizes and sales - though he has all that in spades - but a job. The son of Vietnamese-Chinese immigrants to Canada, Lam has a successful career as a doctor, second only to jurisprudence as the novelist's catalyst to popular success.

The loosely connected short stories of Lam's Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures follow a group of students and their interrelationships as they navigate their way through medical school, then hospital, and the Toronto severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) crisis of 2003.

Published in 2006, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures had an initial run of 5,000 copies - not bad in Canada - though it fared as many first fictions do, ordinarily, and his publishers quickly issued the book in paperback. Then, against expectations, it was shortlisted for the Giller, Canada's most prestigious prize for literary fiction, awarded in previous years to Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje, MG Vassanji and Alice Munro. Lam won, the youngest author to take home the £20,000 award and the only nominee to have done so for a first book. It went on to sell an astonishing 250,000 copies in Canada.

Lam is also the co-author of The Flu Pandemic and You, A Canadian Guide - not some Private Eye joke, but a practical manual advising what to do in the repeat of such an emergency. It is introduced by Margaret Atwood, who met Lam in 2002 while he was serving as the doctor on the Akademik Ioffe, an Arctic cruise ship. Lam asked Atwood if she would read his stories.

"Do you want me to tell you something nice, or something honest?" Atwood answered.

"I was writing my book and not sure how to move forward," Lam says over lunch at a busy Vietnamese workingman's diner in his West Toronto neighbourhood. "I thought: 'Well you know how to write, so why not share some of your wisdom with me?'"

Lam laughs: "One good thing about medicine is that it teaches you, when you don't know something, not to be afraid to ask people who know more than you. Medicine teaches you to be humble."

Later, Atwood e-mailed Lam the message: "Congratulations, you can write."

Not one to leave it at that, she also struck one of the stories from the collection, shifted their order, and suggested that Lam write another, about his experience of Sars, which he called Contact Tracing. (It is one of the best stories in the book.)

Lam started to write when he was 14, in journals and competitions. He won one, aged 15, that earned him a week at creative writing school with the novelist Jane Urquhart. "I was the youngest student in the class," Lam says, his congenial, boyish, face breaking into a wide smile. Writing, not medicine, had always been the objective and, contrary to the immigrant cliché, his artistic ambition was accepted. "Education was what they stressed. There was talk of putting food on the table, and my mother did suggest I might want to teach instead. That way, I'd have the summers off to write."

Lam's touching, always subtle, sometimes funny stories have been described by The New York Times as "journalistic dispatches from the medical front lines". Their drama is derived from the Emergency Room, from the relationships of his characters in the off-hours and, in one of my own favourites, the testy interaction between night-shift doctors and the police. In Eli, a couple of cops bring in a vagabond, who may well have been beaten by them, and swagger about the hospital as if the territory was theirs. In the course of things, the arrested man bites the young doctor in charge. Furious with the policemen, and then his obstreperous patient, the doctor, like so many of Lam's characters, never quite says what he means.

"Beyond the experience of the ER," Lam says, "the principal thing a doctor must learn to do every day is to communicate. During my practice, I spend a lot of time thinking about what people are saying - but also about what they hope will be heard."

Lam considered family medicine and even psychiatry, but decided against both because "I really wanted to be able to do all that stuff that kids think of doctors as doing. Fixing bones, tending to heart attacks" - or, as the medical student Ming does during a class in dissection, slicing the penis of the cadaver the group has called "Murphy".

"You guys OK?"

"Sure," said Chen.

"Someone want the testicles?"

Quite refreshingly, Lam is not at all precious about the provenance of his stories - this one from a creative writing class, that one from his conversations with Atwood. It is a measure of his talent, but also of the humility that comes to him so easily.

Winning the Giller Prize, in November 2006, Lam demonstrated heaps of it. Accepting the award, he invoked Pierre Trudeau, the late Canadian Prime Minister, and the policy of multiculturalism he introduced, and which let his parents in. He spoke of the hard work his father put in to make ends meet, working in construction and as a short-order cook before becoming, as he is today, the Agricultural Counsellor for Canada in India.

In one story, a young medical student flies to Australia to visit his dying grandfather. A Long Migration throws light upon the family's immigrant experience and is a story that Lam readily describes as "autobiographical". Now he is finishing a historical novel that draws directly on his family story.

"It's called Cholon, Near Forgotten, and it's the first book I ever wanted to write. When I was 14, it was the book I wanted to write. When I took leave from my work in public health, it was the book I wanted to write, but I was nervous about it and so I put it off and wrote Bloodletting instead."

And there are other, fresh challenges - including being the father of two infant boys. "This novel is a much-delayed book," he says ruefully.

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam
Fourth Estate, £12.99

© Times 2008