LOVE AND MODERN MEDICINE

Eleven stories in a second collection (after I Am Having an Adventure, 19TK) from novelist, essay writer, and practicing pediatrician Klass (Baby Doctor, 1992, etc.) that detail with compassion those times in women’s lives when medicine and love hover in attendance, sometimes as helpless bystanders, at other times as triumphant saviors.

These are women’s stories in the best sense: some are closer to magazine fiction—where they have appeared in publications like Glamour and Redbook—others, like the title story, are accomplished tales that resonate as they describe the treacherous vulnerability of life. In that O. Henry winner (one of three here), the narrator, a pediatrician and mother of two, muses on the helplessness of love and modern medicine, “both useless,” as she tries to comfort her stepsister, whose baby has died from SIDS, as well as face up to her own fears about her children’s mortality. Friendship between women is another theme Klass explores with sensitivity and a nicely dry wit. In “For Women Anywhere,” Doris, a friend since high school, comes to help when Alison, single by choice, gives birth. “Freedom Fighter” describes how a mother and obstetrician, just weeks away from delivering her third child, pretends she is a freedom fighter able to make “ revolutionary gestures,” as she spends a weekend touring New England with an old friend; and in “The Province of Bearded Fathers,” Willow, whose own life is going nowhere, helps her friend Janet, a scientist who has charged her boss with sexual harassment, to understand that she is not responsible for his suicide. Other notables deal with the parents of a strong-willed but sensitive child who must respond to complaints that she’s disruptive in school (“The Trouble with Sophie”); a divorced woman’s fierce love for her ill son (“Rainbow Mama”); and a single mother’s mixed emotions when she finds an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve (“City Sidewalks”).

Refreshingly unsentimental reminders of the mysteries and magic of life from a wise and accomplished writer.