THE HEALING BOOK

Troubled doctors and office drones look for meaning by methods both mundane and magical in Grinnell’s short stories.

The Bostonian characters in this collection are mostly doctors who feel guilty about their inability to save patients and white-collar workers numbed by purposeless routines yearning for more authentic existences. They include a neurosurgeon, grief-stricken by her sister’s death, who drinks a psychedelic ayahuasca potion and gains the ability to resurrect the dead; a buttoned-down website manager who resolves to help a frustrated aquarium orca escape to the sea; a Harvard researcher in Kenya who is confronted by a woman who implores him to cure her daughter’s terminal case of malaria; a film student who makes a documentary on the thwarted lives of a hospital’s marketing team; a would-be writer who grows disillusioned with self-improvement nostrums before inventing his own; and a psychiatrist who struggles to save a depressed woman who vows to commit suicide on her 25th birthday if she doesn’t cheer up. The author makes absorbing digressions into everything from motorcycle maintenance to firefly bioluminescence, and poses quiet but passionate philosophical challenges to his characters in their quests for self-actualization. Grinnell writes vividly in many registers, from spooky action (“Allie exhaled. ‘Breathe.’ Suddenly the patient twitched. Then his back contorted, and he inhaled a massive gulp of air”) to shrewd, anthropological dissections of toxic office politics (“it seemed common practice for employees to weaponize HR against one another”). He illuminates plangent feelings of sickness and sorrow, as in the title story, in which a husband neglects his wife in a futile effort to find a cure for her illness (“An embrace wouldn’t have taken away her cancer, but at least she wouldn’t have felt so alone and cold during those long, dark winter nights”). The result is an entertaining set of tales that pack an emotional wallop.

A luminous collection of stories found in the thin margins between loss, failure, and redemption.