Cutting for Stone

When I heard about Cutting for Stone, it sounded like a book I was guaranteed to like. Years ago, I read and really enjoyed Abraham Verghese's memoir, My Own Country. Now he has written a novel that combines his skills as a doctor with those of a writer. I saw that it had gotten excellent reviews and was excited to read it.

But I was disappointed. The plot did not really engage me until the last third or so of the book, and the characters felt a little bit flat and not fully developed. But what really annoyed me about this book was Verghese's overuse of detailed medical/surgical descriptions to help move the plot along.

"She first put a catheter through the urethra into the bladder to divert the urine away from the fistula to allow the wet, macerated tissues to dry and heal... She had to carefully dissect out the edges of fistula, trying to find what had once been discrete layers of bladder lining, bladder wall, and then vaginal wall and vaginal lining..."

It didn't work for me. It felt to me like Verghese didn't trust his skill as a writer or storyteller to move the story along; he had to resort to what he really knows, and that's medicine. I'm reminded of the fact that Khaled Hosseini, who wrote the excellent books The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, is also a physician. Thankfully, he told us stories without constantly reminding us that he's a doctor too (although I do not believe he still practices medicine).