Contagious: A Novel
by Scott Sigler
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Book Summary Information
Author: Scott SiglerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-12-29
ISBN: 0307406326
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of Contagious: A Novel
Book Review: Monumental work
Summary: 5 Stars
In CHEEVER, Blake Bailey has produced a biography every bit as absorbing as the life of its complex and tortured subject. Following on his masterful biography of another troubled (albeit much less appreciated) writer, Richard Yates, this latest work establishes Bailey as one of the preeminent literary biographers working today.
What makes this biography so extraordinarily rich is the fact that the Cheever family granted Bailey access to a journal of some 4,300 single-spaced pages Cheever began keeping in 1939 and maintained to the time of his death in 1982. It's a revealing document in the depth of its self-knowledge (and often the contrasting lack thereof), a painfully candid, often shocking, collection of writings, what Bailey calls "a monument of tragicomic solipsism...a history of one man's struggle to be illustrious."
Much of Cheever's story is at odds with his public persona, beginning with the image he nurtured of an upbringing as a patrician WASP. In truth, he was the younger son of a downwardly mobile family from Quincy, Massachusetts, a worse than indifferent student and a high school dropout at the age of 18, in 1930. An autodidact whose voracious reading included Flaubert, Proust, Fielding and Sterne, he published his first story that same year in The New Republic. Cheever came of age in an era before promising young writers could spend two years pursuing an MFA at an institution like the Iowa Writers' Workshop (where in the 1970s he befriended John Irving and taught T.C. Boyle). Instead, he lived on the edge of starvation in Depression-era New York City, in the midst of which he published the first of his 121 stories to appear in The New Yorker, the magazine with which his career is most closely linked.
That privation is one of the more startling aspects of Bailey's account. When one recalls that Cheever was featured on the cover of both Time (1964) and Newsweek (1977), it's astonishing to learn of the financial struggles that plagued him most of his life. The Cheever family did not own a house until 1961, when they moved to Ossining, New York, and Cheever was locked in perpetual combat with The New Yorker, chiefly through his editor and longtime friend, William Maxwell, over what he thought (with justification, it appears) was inadequate payment for his stories.
But it was those matchless tales, more so than novels like THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE or FALCONER, that should cement Cheever's reputation as one of the masters of American literature. His stories eventually earned him the Pulitzer Prize with the publication of THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER in 1978. Spanning a period of more than 30 years of published works and encompassing 61 stories, among them modern classics like "The Country Husband," The Five-Forty-Eight" and "The Swimmer," that volume is the product of a boundless imagination and a textbook of the art.
Watching the account of Cheever's chronic alcoholism, bisexuality and persistent emotional cruelty to his wife of 41 years and three children unfold in Bailey's narrative, it's even harder to reconcile that life with a man capable of writing prose as gorgeous as the matchless concluding sentence of "The Country Husband:" "Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains." Or the similarly stunning sentence that brings to a close "Goodbye, My Brother:" "I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea." Through all of Cheever's woes, many self-inflicted, it's impossible not to feel a sense of gratitude for the fact that such beauty can emerge out of one writer's personal agony.
Thus, and perhaps inevitably, while CHEEVER devotes ample consideration to its subject's writing, the focus of Bailey's attention is the ineffably sad life of this tormented man. Despite the family's generous cooperation, this is anything but a hagiographic treatment. At its worst, Cheever's life, exposed here (often in his own words) in all its emotional isolation, deceit and self-deception, is likely to make all but the most callous reader wince.
At the heart of that story is the depressing tale of Cheever's lifelong struggle with his twin demons: alcoholism (he finally achieved sobriety in 1975 after nearly dying) and bisexuality, to which he was reconciled only reluctantly in the last years of his life. Both are described in what can only be characterized as harrowing detail. Considering the mores of Cheever's time, perhaps it's not so remarkable that he was able to conceal both his drinking and his sexual orientation beneath the façade of the respectable Westchester County burgher, but the price he paid for doing so was incalculable.
Undoubtedly it's unrealistic, even naïve, to expect our literary idols to lead personal lives as exemplary or as charming as the exquisite works they leave behind, and the annals of literature are replete with examples that the contrary is often the case. "He was at his best on the page," notes Cheever's son Ben. And, as his wife Mary, the victim of so much of his cruelty, observed, "What's important is what he wrote, not what he did. What was important in his life was to go on writing." Let's be thankful that Blake Bailey, in this monumental work, wasn't restricted by that dictum, leaving us with a full-blooded portrait of a man literary historians, if there's any justice, someday will adjudge one of America's greats.
Summary of Contagious: A Novel
From the acclaimed author of Infected comes an epic and exhilarating story of humanity?s secret battle against a horrific enemy.Across America, a mysterious pathogen transforms ordinary people into raging killers, psychopaths driven by a terrifying, alien agenda. The human race fights back, yet after every battle the disease responds, adapts, using sophisticated strategies and brilliant ruses to fool its pursuers. The only possible explanation: the epidemic is driven not by evolution but by some malevolent intelligence.
Standing against this unimaginable threat is a small group, assembled under the strictest secrecy. Their best weapon is hulking former football star Perry Dawsey, left psychologically shattered by his own struggles with this terrible enemy, who possesses an unexplainable ability to locate the disease?s hosts. Violent and unpredictable, Perry is both the nation?s best hope and a terrifying liability. Hardened CIA veteran Dew Phillips must somehow forge a connection with him if they?re going to stand a chance against this maddeningly adaptable opponent. Alongside them is Margaret Montoya, a brilliant epidemiologist who fights for a cure even as she reels under the weight of endless horrors.
These three and their team have kept humanity in the game, but that?s not good enough anymore, not when the disease turns contagious, triggering a fast countdown to Armageddon. Meanwhile, other enemies join the battle, and a new threat ? one that comes from a most unexpected source ? may ultimately prove the most dangerous of all.
Catapulting the reader into a world where humanity?s life span is measured in hours and the president?s finger hovers over the nuclear button, rising star Scott Sigler takes us on a breathtaking, hyper-adrenalized ride filled with terror and jaw-dropping action. Contagious is a truly grand work of suspense, science, and horror from a new master.
From the Hardcover edition.
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