An Exercise in Uncertainty:
A Memoir of Illness and Hope
by Jonathan Gluck (Rodale, Inc.)
This is a memoir of the author’s life, in particularly as it relates to his diagnosis of multiple myeloma,* which is a type of blood cancer. The author is an accomplished journalist, and so he approaches it in a journalist-like manner. This is excellent at the points where he is discussing cancer and cancer therapies in general. Emperor of All Maladies is legendary, but I came out of this feeling better informed from that book due to that journalistic edge. Sometimes the tendency towards journalism hurts when the book shifts into interview-mode with some of its participants, which does not match with the rest of the book.
The other problem with the journalism is how the author comes off. I do not complain about coastal media elites as a dogwhistle. I complain about them in a Third Coast, Second City, my Daniel Burnham can beat up your Robert Moses sort of way. With travel and sport writing, complete with a fly fishing metaphor, completes my sort of utter disrespect. There is some mirror-universe review here where I write 800 words on the relevance of the author’s gender* to this writing in comparison to other similar texts. And with the valid prefatory mention of how much insurance sucks – it does – the focus here is on someone getting a high level of care, from a variety of high-skill providers in a hermetic world.
But do not listen to that me: this book rules.
The defining quality is that the author has cancer for 20 years. It has always been deleterious to his life, and he is plain and excoriating about it. But the medical advances that prolong the author’s life and quality of life are happening in real time across the course of the text. He avoids getting too philosophical with it, but he is also aware of the question that medicine raises. As much as there is a social norm of health/sickness, increasingly people live in the slash*. Most of the books I have read that dealt with this treat it as more of an ethical failing or social crisis: the bigotry against the disabled. This book is aware of it, and raises it when appropriate, but is much more interested in the materialist side. Language fails to cover what this new state is and what it means for society. This then is not a philosophical treatise on that novel-ish state, but a description of it, emotional and provocative.
The writing again belays the author’s training. It is foremost accessible, neither plain nor elaborate but what it needs to be when it needs to be to do the job of explaining that it wants to. It moves along at a good clip and the sort of sections and microchapters work well. There is excellent signaling, not foreshadowing but good work in laying the flags out for future events. The ending is weak, thankfully, as the author is alive.
The sort of work and research here is exactly the same that the current U.S. administration has destroyed, and with knock-on effects promising that the sort of world this book explores will not expand and will retract, leading to your friends dying. And while it is easy to complain about the author’s privilege and access to the best experts for instance, the anti-science positions of the administration mean that even the well-off will not be able to reap the benefits, since no one will have done the work. So while this book avoids politics, feel free to use it as an example to your well-meaning idiot friends as to the hope we will not see.
My thanks to the author, Jonathan Gluck, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Rodale, Inc., for making the ARC available to me.
* – Conflict of interest(?) disclosure: I have a first-order relative who also has this cancer, and I have been involved in their care. I have also been the bad guy in the relationship with someone with chronic illness. And I am at or near that slash, and, notably, forget that I am sometimes, which feels pretty relevant for the text in general.
CITATION HEEDED 