Mercy Ward
by Elizabeth Hand for Washington Post Book World (Dec. 29, 2006)
“Many novelists set themselves the task of confronting the world’s ills in their fiction. Fewer attempt to actually cure them, as Chris Adrian does in his second novel, The Children’s Hospital, a sprawling and impassioned morality tale in which a catastrophe of biblical scale wipes out nearly all life, human and otherwise, on Earth. Adrian has an impressive CV for a young writer: The author of a critically acclaimed debut novel, Gob’s Grief, and short fiction that has appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, he’s also a pediatrician now studying at Harvard Divinity School. All of these experiences bear fruit in The Children’s Hospital, though that fruit may be a specialized taste, more durian or rambutan than apple or plum.”
