Hell and high water

THERE are times when the end of the world feels nigher than usual. This is one of those times. How will the world end? Plague, poison, divine or human wrath -- we’re spoiled for choice. In Chris Adrian’s odd, ardent, extraordinary novel “The Children’s Hospital,” it ends with a second Flood, seven deep miles of water covering everything on Earth but a children’s hospital that has been repurposed by an angel-assisted architect into an ark. Aboard are 699 sick children; sundry adults -- including parents, nurses, doctors, a maintenance man and a tamale vendor -- and Jemma Claflin, our heroine, a mediocre med student, who is having sex with another medical student in a call room while the old world drowns.

The cause of the flood? Not global warming but Jemma’s brother Calvin. Afire with adolescent rage, he made himself a sacrifice to God in a particularly gruesome manner that seems to have involved scooping his eyes out with spoons, whereupon legions of angels bowed down to him and history was rebooted. Four angels attend the ark on its voyage: a preserving angel, an accusing angel, a destroying angel and the recording angel who is writing this book as scripture for the world to come.

I don’t know about gospel, but this enormous book is as beautiful and chilling as the flood itself, miles of limpid, sparkling prose, in which something rather somber is concealed. The reader does not sink into the depths but skips with surprising ease across the bright surface, bobbing unperturbed above the graves of what the recording angel calls, wryly, the “billy-uns and billy-uns.”

For readers and characters both, it proves disquietingly easy to dispense with the dead. Few of us love more than an ark’s worth of people anyway; most of us love far fewer. The billions are mourned, no thanks to the ham-handed condolences of the preserving angel, but there are distractions. It is hard not to kind of like the idea of bobbing around the world on a giant cruise ship on which angel-powered, “Star Trek”-like “replicators” can synthesize customized porno, ice cream, sequined shoes -- just about everything but a ticket home. So, like the passengers, the reader adjusts fairly quickly to the new state of affairs, which in some ways is not that different from the old: After all, there are still the sick kids to look after, and that’s what a hospital is for.

Or it is until Jemma (“The Mother of all!” “The most important girl!” shout the angels) starts emitting a green fire that can burn away tumors, heal the lame, give sight to the blind -- in short, right every “wrongness.” She rampages through the hospital, healing every last patient. After this, the adults hardly know what to do with themselves. They bicker over government, teach the kids clogging and even stage musicals, until they all come down with something called the “blotch,” which even Jemma can’t cure, and the booming words of comfort broadcast through the PA by the preserving angel begin to ring even more hollow than usual.

If this sounds dark, it is, but Adrian’s touch is light. Noah’s Flood is a child’s first apocalypse -- there are Noah’s ark musical crib mobiles and plush pastel arks stuffed with jingling animals -- and “The Children’s Hospital” has echoes of a children’s book as it takes on questions of good and evil with an earnestness rare in adult fiction while remaining seriously fun to read; the funky everyday cohabits naturally with the miraculous. The angel tells us of Jemma’s friend: “Vivian asks her replicator for a cup of tea and nearly drops it when it comes with a lamentation. ‘Woe!’ my sister shouts. ‘O the innocent world! O creation!’ ”

In a different writer’s hands, this could have been a silly book. Angels certainly allow a writer extraordinary liberties: How can the waters rise seven miles in approximately the time it takes to have an orgasm? How can a hospital morph into a ship? How can one angry teenager cause an apocalypse? Yet the novel doesn’t feel frivolous, because it is so thoroughly imagined, from the rancid Twinkie of Jemma’s childhood to the fruit-leather crotch of a pair of postdiluvian pants. At times too thoroughly: The phantasmagoria could be trimmed a little, as could the realistic scenes, abristle with details and acronyms -- AML, EEG, PICU -- of life in a hospital ward.

However, Adrian earns our indulgence: Our attention to one hurting child after another pays off. When every last body is lifted up, burned clean and made whole, it’s almost obscenely satisfying. It takes an angel to wonder whether something is lost in a world without wrongness: “[S]omeone has to mourn for all the lost sicknesses, for the jolly fleshy tumors and fancy blood dyscrasias and unique anatomies that will never be seen again in a child.”

Adrian isn’t the first to see a hospital as a charged site, a place where death and love are closer to the surface than usual and the body undergoes metamorphoses as pitiable and helpless as Ovid’s. “The Children’s Hospital” reminded me of “Riget” (“The Kingdom”) Lars von Trier’s Danish miniseries about a haunted hospital, in its inspired mixture of realism, horror and the sublime. But Adrian’s is a very American nightmare. The flashbacks into Jemma’s childhood are all suburban barbecues and fireworks and Valium and Santa Claus. If the rest of the world existed then, you wouldn’t know it.

The flood provides a metaphor for an America weirdly isolated from the rest of humanity and too preoccupied with curing its various ailments to spare a glance at the rising tide. Only Vivian takes the time to ask why they are there, drafting a list of unpardonable sins: “Novels about shoes,” “grade-school beauty pageants,” “the people who dress up dogs and children and take pictures for greeting cards.” What we usually consider the truly mortal sins are conspicuously absent; our real crime is triviality, failing to feel or think or try hard enough. We’ve got our heads in our replicators, Adrian suggests, and we deserve everything that’s coming to us -- hell and high water.

But the super-sized punishment is American too, the bulimic fantasy of a nation that has had a little too much of everything: first the binge, with its concomitant pangs of guilt, then the mother of all purges. After which the considerably slimmed-down remainder is restored to a state of unblemished wholeness -- never mind the cost. There is something lacking, however, in a redemption achieved through violence, Adrian suggests. You could call it mercy.

A related theme drives his first novel, “Gob’s Grief,” to which “The Children’s Hospital” is kin. (Literally, in the case of Jemma and Calvin, who are descended from characters in the earlier book.) The two share a character, Pickie Beecher, addressed by the angel as “abomination,” a boy who likes fresh blood on his ice cream and gleefully squirts liquid excrement over the examining Dr. Snood. They also share an interest in a particular strain of reformist zealotry running through the American makeup. In “Gob’s Grief,” that strain takes material form in a complex machine designed to defeat death. Its battery -- which it is destined to drain utterly -- is a human being, Walt Whitman. That a poet should be destroyed by the machine to end death strikes me as no coincidence. The desire to erase loss is oddly violent against our fragile real lives, and ultimately antithetical to poetry, which embraces ambiguity and the transitory. The theme carries over to “The Children’s Hospital”: The recording angel’s scriptures are written for nobody’s eyes, he tells us; in the future, no one will read.

The angels may rejoice at the end of sin, but the reader will share the passengers’ ambivalence. A world with no loss or deficit is no world for human beings. When an angel tells Pickie that, in the new world, he will no longer grieve for his lost brother, Pickie sneers, “That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard.” Well said.

At one point along the voyage, an angel cheers the wandering spirit of a sick child, taking him bungee-jumping on the elastic tether that binds them to their destiny. They hurtle into the black depths of the ocean and boing back up again. “I think I saw bones!” exclaims the kid. “Can I do it again?” That’s the spirit of this wonderful book, goofy and grim and joyous, all at once. *