Good, he knows, is best if done at home (it’s like giving something to yourself in secret), and evil is best done at a distance (as in Vietnam).Ĭoiled within the acts of the caduceus, Billy grows into William. Life, after all, as Billy already has learned from Sister Symphorosa, is something you can make book on it is a series of negotiations with a carnival deity.īesides, he has every intention of doing as much good as possible, especially when it’s a member of his own convoluted family who needs help and if he must do evil-if for instance he must punish cigarette smokers by inflicting cancer on anyone who uses a lighter he has exposed to the caduceus-then so be it. He only has to remember that nothing he does with the caduceus can be undone, and that every time he uses it for good he must recharge the two interwoven snakelike sticks by doing harm. Santa’s other name is Mercury, and if Billy is good he will give him a caduceus for his very own, and he will be able to do things with it. Santa Claus has spoken to him already, in a voice like gravel, out of an icy whirlwind. As she strangles their joy she smiles, sure that her victims, coiled in guilt, are now ready to spend the rest of their lives negotiating with the church for salvation.īut Billy knows better. Paul, Minn., young Billy Michaels throws a kindergarten tantrum when the appalling Sister Symphorosa insists to her captive audience of tiny children that there is no Santa Claus, and tells them why it is blasphemous to believe in him. In the mid-1970s, in the tangled working-class Catholic heart of St.
And each new page, like an electric eel, is poised to shock. “The M.D.” may be profound and dark and very dire, but it is also a page-turner.
It depicts through scorching flashes of detail the inexorable growth of AIDS and of its even more terrible successor it is grimly cynical about priests and politicians, doctors and fund-raisers, grannies and dads, moms and sons and daughters.īut then, after frightening any reader half to death, it would be only fair to say one more thing about Disch’s magnum opus. Disch’s “The M.D.,” we might say, is a fine and scathing anatomy of post-Vietnam America, a sly indictment of the organized religions of the Western world, a tragic tale of moral paralysis and sin. It would be easy to make this book seem unreadable by praising it.
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