Author’s illness informed final novel
“The death of the author” is a concept put forth in a 1967 essay by Roland Barthes in which he argues that approaching a work with the author’s intentions or biography in mind is not the best way to understand its meaning. Better, he says, to act as though the author is dead, thereby separating the creator from the text and treating the creation on its own terms.
Whether a reader agrees with that method, one must acknowledge that sometimes the author is literally and not just metaphorically dead. Moreover, sometimes where the creator’s life and the material in his creation intersect is actually one of the most illuminating ways to consider a book.
Such is arguably the case with Samuel Park, whose second novel, “The Caregiver,” has just been published posthumously. The book, though an absorbing and well-crafted work of fiction capable of standing on its own, is almost impossible to consider independently of the knowledge of where its author’s life overlaps with his art.
Born in Brazil and raised in Los Angeles, Park taught creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago and wrote the 2006 novella “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” and the 2012 novel “This Burns My Heart.” Diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2014, Park completed “The Caregiver” just before dying in 2017 at age 41.
Set in Brazil and Southern California, “The Caregiver” tells the story of a struggling single mother, Ana, who works as a voiceover actress in Rio de Janeiro, and her devoted daughter, Mara — who is forced to flee the country to escape the fallout from Ana’s involvement in a plot against one of Rio’s corrupt and brutal police chiefs. Mara arrives in LA and finds work as a caregiver; her primary patient is a wealthy young divorcee named Kathryn who is undergoing treatment for stomach cancer.
“People think that when you’re sick, you want pity,” Kathryn tells Mara. “But it’s not pity, it’s love. It’s the only thing that makes it more bearable.” The story that Park tells here, fittingly, is free of pity but full of compassion. And while it is not essential that a reader know that Park’s own background involves both distinct settings and that he himself met an early end from the same disease that he gives to one of his main characters, that knowledge undeniably adds an extra layer of interest and pathos to an already-moving novel.
The patterns of caretaking between Ana and Mara feel intense and authentic, as does the isolation that their dyad creates, which causes Mara, at 8, to observe of her mother, “She was a river, and I was just the boat careening from side to side.”
Less convincing are some of the splashy, soap operatic plot twists that Park puts in as the book goes on, sacrificing characterization and plausibility in favor of utilitarian occasions for secrets to be revealed. In fairness, these decisions do keep the pages turning, but at times they feel rushed and make the reader long for more quiet moments, as when Nelson, Kathryn’s ex-husband, tells Mara of her mother, “don’t make a god out of her. It’s hard to forgive God, but you can forgive a person.”
Park published a heartbreaking essay about his impending death called “I Had a 9 Percent Chance. Plus Hope” in The New York Times in January 2017, and his publisher has included the piece at the end of this novel. In it, Park writes that “Cancer is a promissory note, and the spaces for ‘when’ and even ‘if,’ for those in earlier stages are left blank.” In a sense, the novel reminds us everyone’s blanks get filled in sooner or later, and all anyone can do is try to come to terms with that.
In reply to one of Mara’s periodic reassurances that she’ll be fine, Kathryn replies, “No, I won’t. But the ultimate goal is not to convince myself that nothing bad’s going to happen. The goal is to know something bad will happen, but still be okay with it.” Park’s book leaves readers with a chance to think seriously and directly about some of the worst things that can happen, a chance that feels even more rare and grave now that the author is permanently gone. Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.”