A Busy Canvas

America! íevicw A Busy Canvas John Domini Patient 002 Floyd Skloot Rager Media http://www.ragermedia.com 288 pages; paper, $19.95 In Portland, Oregon in the 1990s, people who talked about good writing talked about Floyd Skloot. He was one of those who set the standard, whether in a 600-word piece for the Oregonian or in his longer work. His first book appeared in 1992, the novel Pilgrim 's Harbor. His third novel, The Open Door in 1997, made the short list for a number of awards, thanks to its clear-eyed dissection of abuse and its consequences within a comfortable Jewish family. A fascinating amalgam of the horrifying and the warm hearted. Open Door remains a rare accomplishment — and miserably neglected. Unnoticed in the major review venues, the novel was his last till this spring. Happily, however, Skloot began to make a reputation in other genres. As the millennium turned, his poems won considerable recognition, and he became best known for essays on a topic almost as disturbing as child abuse, namely, the withering effects of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The disease had struck Skloot in the late 80s, so that Portland writers like myself rarely saw him; he was hunkered down out in the vineyard country. Still, there was no ignoring the man, because once he concentrated his gifts on his struggle with CFS, the results began appearing in the Pushcart and Best American anthologies. In time the essays were gathered into three celebrated collections, the most recent A World ofLight in 2005. The books stand as special exemplars of "creative non-fiction" (their author helped establish the form, though he remains too sick to teach) and offer an unconventional brand ofautobiography. The point isn't where the story of a life takes us—there's little by way of triumph over adversity—but rather how a life develops unsuspected avenues of possibility , how it remains a good life even while severely curtailed and inexorably eroding. And with Patient 002, for some of us a longawaited new novel, this author has worked his way to a fresh embodiment of the same discovery: the vitality and fertility to be found beneath the glossy surfaces of what's usually considered health. Skloot's most kinetic fiction by far, Patient 002 entails elements of the triumph over adversity, yes. But one also finds the mid-life love story, corporate satire, Big-Chill comedy, and caper movie. The canvas gets so busy that I took my flashlight down into the basement and looked over dusty old superlatives like "ripping yam." This isn't yourprofessor's Floyd Skloot, ruminating on John Donne and Ayurvedic medicine, but a sensibility more akin to Joseph Conrad with all the burners going, brewing up a whopper like Nostromo (1904). Despite all that, and despite the title's echo of James Bond, Skloot's novel resonates throughout with a meditative undertone. An analogy for that undertone might be drawn from Johannes Brahms, the sort of cello-line he packs with feeling—just as developing the patience for classical music is one of the ways that Skloot's suffering protagonist, Sam Kiehl, marshals fresh resources for his new life as a very sick man. Kiehl is the eponymous patient, one of the guinea pigs in a research group for an experimental drug. His illness goes unidentified, but it has a debilitating impact much like CFS. Also the novel's setting is Portland, and anyone familiar with the essays will note another point or two in common between Kiehl and his creator. But Skloot has no interest in re-retelling his own story. Patient 002 quickly establishes itself as quite another kettle of narrative, with a looming menace and a colorful cast. The first warning about that menace is sounded by a right-on old curmudgeon, shaking with Parkinson 's—and with indignation. He's part of the study, like Sam, and like Sam seeing no improvement. "What happens in here's about the drugs," declares the old-timer, "some rich company's goddamn new product. It's not about people." The goddamn company in question is PER, the acronym of Physicians for Ethical Research (lie to me, baby...