Title: Hospital!: A Medical Satire of Unhealthy Proportions
Author: Kyle Bradford Jones
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
ISBN: 1685130909
Pages: 128
Genre: Fiction / Satire
Reviewed by: David Allen
Hollywood Book Reviews
Welcome to the ‘zany hellzapoppin’ world of The Peloton Forward Crescendo Care Amicus Health Priority Catalyst Wellness Code Blue Memorial Hospital of Her Motherly Excellence. A world inhabited by the reprehensible obscenity-spewing Dr. Camus and an incandescent gang of characters including the Censor; Blaine the Administrative Assistant; a troop of orthopedic surgeons on antidepressants; and thirty clowns with ‘glitter lung’ waiting to be treated in the emergency room.
Everything is wrong. So wrong that Dr. Camus refers patients on: go to the hospital up the street! So, everyone is on his case. Camus is a master diagnostician – when in doubt, he turns to Wikipedia.
You get the picture. This manic tour de force, written by someone obviously in the know – Kyle Bradford Jones (an M.D.) – upbraids, lampoons and lambasts each and every person, trope and tendency in hospital medicine. Jones is a witty word-slinger, in the stream of consciousness jokey tradition of David Foster Wallace, Larry David, and, yes, Hunter S. Thompson. Jones’ writing – agitated, boiling over, over the top – accurately reflects the pell-mell profit-driven stewpot of robber baron health care.
No one is spared. Hospital! is exuberant, manic and filled with repartee. The mudslinging is alternately caustic, hilarious, and almost always delights. Camus (who insists that he is not French) is “simply a jerk.” We watch Camus slouching toward Bethlehem and Jerkdom; we enjoy the steeplechase ride. Camus’ goal? “To be as scurrilous as possible.” “The scumbag doctor is tolerated because of his brilliance.”
Camus, overthinking and questioning everything, roundly succeeds. This delightful book roasts and toasts everything that came before: the television series House; Fight Club; The Matrix; Hollywood movies in general. The excessive and inappropriate use of language is ground zero. Hospital entrepreneurialism; the vocabulary and rhetoric of today’s health care ‘providers’ (too often franchises, misguided by evil administrators and mavens of managed care): all these are suitable targets for Kyle Bradford Jones’ showcase of wit.
Jones has previously published Fallible: A Memoir of a Young Physician’s Struggle with Mental Illness. It is in everyone’s interest – readers, patients, and ‘consumers’ of health care alike – that Jones’ fiction and absurdist reportage continue. Write on!
Whenever possible, avoid hospitals. And read this book!