DOCTOR OLAF VAN SCHULER’S BRAIN

Debut collection chronicles a family of medical misfits.

In Amsterdam, in 1662, Dr. Olaf van Dijk began his study of brains. He slices open the heads of all kinds of animals before a botched bleeding provides him with both a human corpse and a need to hide it. Once he has the body in his own home, the temptation to cut into the skull and peer inside proves irresistible. Unfortunately, his mother’s screams alert the neighbors. Obliged to leave, the doctor takes his mad mother with him to New Amsterdam, where he reinvents himself as a Dr. Olaf van Schuler. This medical man with a strange obsession and a family history of insanity becomes the progenitor of several generations of equally dubious physicians and outright charlatans. Interconnected stories chronicle the history of this peculiar family, as well as surveying manias, enthusiasms and questionable healthcare from mesmerism to breast implants. The collection unfolds like a Jacob’s ladder, with characters from one tale growing old into the next, as younger characters are introduced. Menger-Anderson shows considerable formal and stylistic control—perhaps too much control. Each story has more or less the same shape, and each ends on a dramatic note. Although they are connected, the repercussions of one tale’s climax are never felt in the next. There are revelations and reversals, but the material is so tightly structured that it allows no room for shock or surprise—or, ultimately, for much feeling at all.

Anyone interested in American quackery will find Menger-Anderson’s vignettes informative, even entertaining, but her style is too stiff for satisfying storytelling.