In the 1840s, a young man named Silas Weir begins practicing medicine in Pennsylvania. Though he is considered inept by family, neighbors, and even his mentor, Dr. Weir discovers he has a gift for phlebotomy, treating patients by bleeding them to purify their bodies. But when an experimental procedure goes horribly wrong, Dr. Weir is forced to start over, relocating his family to Trenton, New Jersey, and taking a position at the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics. There, in the hopes of proving his detractors wrong, Dr. Weir continues practicing dangerous procedures, and soon becomes infatuated with Brigit - a pregnant woman he treats - whom he tries to take her under his wing as an apprentice. As Dr. Weir's experiments grow more intense - and as he isolates himself from his family and the world beyond the facility - he grows obsessed with Brigit and the other residents who remain at his mercy, and before long, establishes himself as "the father of gyno-psychiatry.
The book has the feverish energy, narrative propulsion and descriptive amplitude — sometimes to excess — of much of her earlier work ... Undoubtedly one of her most surreal and gruesome works, sparing no repulsive detail or nefarious impulse. In the end, though, the purview of the novel is larger than one might think, becoming an empathic and discerning commentary on women’s rights, the abuses of patriarchy and the servitude of the poor and disenfranchised. Oates, as is her wont, succeeds in creating a world that is apart from our own yet familiar, making it impossible to dismiss her observations about twisted natures and random acts of violence.
Joyce Carol Oates is masterful in this horrific portrait of a 19th century doctor who treats his patients more as subjects for experiments than as people to cure ... Oates is definitely giving oppressed and silenced women a loud, clear cry in this subtle, complicated story. But nothing is quite how it seems, even Jonathan's seemingly 'objective' motives. Strand upon subtle strand is woven together in a story that's part dystopian fable, part family drama, part feminist reckoning ... Weir isn't all evil, however. Oates is too good a writer for that, far too nuanced ... It takes a writer of great skill to pull of the feat of keeping a reader engaged through so much brutality. Oates' writing is so deft and the world she creates so vivid, one keeps turning the pages, all the way to the deeply unsettling ending.
Oates’ daring tale of grotesque medical experiments and other injustices is unnerving, illuminating, suspenseful, mythic, and, thankfully, tempered by transcendence and love.
