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Rx: A Novel
First, do no harm...
A patient comes to you with vague but troubling symptoms. He seems to know a little too much about the odd sickness you’ve seen in other patients lately. You start to wonder what he’s been up to in his chicken coop. Is he growing the next plague? Should you call the FBI? The only problem is that you’re not really a doctor.
Taking on his dead father’s identity, a man becomes intent on practicing medicine in an out of the way town. He watches the nation bubble into a new kind of civil war around him. A con man amidst rumors, homemade bombs, and a developing sense that he has been “made,” Rx wrestles with a distinct American identity—slippery and always in flight. Between a violent “here” and an anxious “there,” a wider, remapped “America” emerges.
A patient comes to you with vague but troubling symptoms. He seems to know a little too much about the odd sickness you’ve seen in other patients lately. You start to wonder what he’s been up to in his chicken coop. Is he growing the next plague? Should you call the FBI? The only problem is that you’re not really a doctor.
Taking on his dead father’s identity, a man becomes intent on practicing medicine in an out of the way town. He watches the nation bubble into a new kind of civil war around him. A con man amidst rumors, homemade bombs, and a developing sense that he has been “made,” Rx wrestles with a distinct American identity—slippery and always in flight. Between a violent “here” and an anxious “there,” a wider, remapped “America” emerges.
364 pages, Paperback
Published February 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 2, 2022
"Where does a healing begin in this land?”
Where do you begin to stop a country from bleeding? Can you make a difference by healing or failing to heal it one person at a time?
If you play at being a doctor…
The narrator grew up in a broken household, his dad seducing the nurses at the hospital and his mom out of sight. After his father’s death, he sets out to figure out who he is – both in comparison to his father and without his father – while reading up on medicine in outdated books. He reinvents himself as his old man and impersonates being a doctor in a small town full of eccentric but normal and not very likable people, including himself.
Despite the fact that he is not trained for it – nor does he pursue training or study effectively – he does his best to do no harm and offers a listening ear to his patients. He somewhat passively absorbs what is happening in the world around him and is not very passionate about anything. He is lost without a fixed place of residence, occupation, and identity. “What do you live for, Doctor Rex? Maybe it’s just that we die for something.”
Fix the world one person at a time
The world around him is a real mess, with people being found dead, bombings and political struggles. Stories about these events are interspersed with stories about his medical practice. The way his days are described also illustrates his disturbed life and world. The chapters are short, with his personal encounters structured like the events happening around him. One wonders if his impersonation will help him make something of himself.
What I found so impressive about this book is how the conditions of the narrator’s patients begin to reflect the state of the country, a state very reminiscent of what is happening in the real world right now. When he sees his patients, it’s like he’s watching the news.
Skaggs on eggs
Everything the narrator goes through slowly leads him to one of my favorite scenes: the egg-influenced Skaggs on his horse. The scenes the narrator shares with Blackwater and Major Skaggs are always very entertaining. Regardless of the likability of their personalities, they make you think beyond the most visible aspects of the story in Rx, such as how the way many people live their lives is different from being a hostage. The depth of the story increases toward the end. There is no climax or exciting plot, but you feel the control slipping away from the characters. The last page of the book marks a good time to return to the life you hope you can influence. Even if it’s just one person at a time.
Many thanks to Atmosphere Press and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
Where do you begin to stop a country from bleeding? Can you make a difference by healing or failing to heal it one person at a time?
If you play at being a doctor…
The narrator grew up in a broken household, his dad seducing the nurses at the hospital and his mom out of sight. After his father’s death, he sets out to figure out who he is – both in comparison to his father and without his father – while reading up on medicine in outdated books. He reinvents himself as his old man and impersonates being a doctor in a small town full of eccentric but normal and not very likable people, including himself.
Despite the fact that he is not trained for it – nor does he pursue training or study effectively – he does his best to do no harm and offers a listening ear to his patients. He somewhat passively absorbs what is happening in the world around him and is not very passionate about anything. He is lost without a fixed place of residence, occupation, and identity. “What do you live for, Doctor Rex? Maybe it’s just that we die for something.”
Fix the world one person at a time
The world around him is a real mess, with people being found dead, bombings and political struggles. Stories about these events are interspersed with stories about his medical practice. The way his days are described also illustrates his disturbed life and world. The chapters are short, with his personal encounters structured like the events happening around him. One wonders if his impersonation will help him make something of himself.
What I found so impressive about this book is how the conditions of the narrator’s patients begin to reflect the state of the country, a state very reminiscent of what is happening in the real world right now. When he sees his patients, it’s like he’s watching the news.
Skaggs on eggs
Everything the narrator goes through slowly leads him to one of my favorite scenes: the egg-influenced Skaggs on his horse. The scenes the narrator shares with Blackwater and Major Skaggs are always very entertaining. Regardless of the likability of their personalities, they make you think beyond the most visible aspects of the story in Rx, such as how the way many people live their lives is different from being a hostage. The depth of the story increases toward the end. There is no climax or exciting plot, but you feel the control slipping away from the characters. The last page of the book marks a good time to return to the life you hope you can influence. Even if it’s just one person at a time.
Many thanks to Atmosphere Press and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
December 17, 2021
My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Atmosphere Press for an advanced copy of this new literary thriller.
The problem with reading a novel about in which an unnamed narrator crisscrosses a flailing and failing nation riven by terrorism, religiosity and just stupid, all while trying to either find himself or lose himself even deeper in the world of the big lie, is that it seems more like reading Twitter than fiction. In other words Rx: A Novel by Garin Cycholl hits way to close to home.
Our narrator has just watched the decline and death of his father, a doctor of some repute, though a Goldwater fan, so he's not perfect. With a family he is not close with, and nothing really to believe in, he hits the road with a trunk full of his father's medical equipment, medical degrees and blank prescription pads, traveling to no particular place. At the same time America is under attack from within as terrorist attacks, religious militias and other things America does so well fil the news. And a strange new disease makes its appearance.
The book is very well written, with many allusions both to history, literature and other subjects filling the pages. Some of the terror attacks will seem familiar, as if the past always seems to come around again. The characters are not stereotypes of conspiracists, more like that weird uncle or the neighbor who has a whole lot of flags hanging in their yard, none that anyone can identify. They all seem to be looking for something, the narrator maybe finding a purpose, others trying to find anything better than the hand they were dealt.
The book is hard to categorize. A road novel on the highway to hell, just seems to pat. Fight Club but without the organizational skills. You don't like the characters but you can understand them. And I am not sure when it was written but it seems very prescient about events today. Disturbing but very interesting, with quite a few things that I know will stay with me.
The problem with reading a novel about in which an unnamed narrator crisscrosses a flailing and failing nation riven by terrorism, religiosity and just stupid, all while trying to either find himself or lose himself even deeper in the world of the big lie, is that it seems more like reading Twitter than fiction. In other words Rx: A Novel by Garin Cycholl hits way to close to home.
Our narrator has just watched the decline and death of his father, a doctor of some repute, though a Goldwater fan, so he's not perfect. With a family he is not close with, and nothing really to believe in, he hits the road with a trunk full of his father's medical equipment, medical degrees and blank prescription pads, traveling to no particular place. At the same time America is under attack from within as terrorist attacks, religious militias and other things America does so well fil the news. And a strange new disease makes its appearance.
The book is very well written, with many allusions both to history, literature and other subjects filling the pages. Some of the terror attacks will seem familiar, as if the past always seems to come around again. The characters are not stereotypes of conspiracists, more like that weird uncle or the neighbor who has a whole lot of flags hanging in their yard, none that anyone can identify. They all seem to be looking for something, the narrator maybe finding a purpose, others trying to find anything better than the hand they were dealt.
The book is hard to categorize. A road novel on the highway to hell, just seems to pat. Fight Club but without the organizational skills. You don't like the characters but you can understand them. And I am not sure when it was written but it seems very prescient about events today. Disturbing but very interesting, with quite a few things that I know will stay with me.
January 24, 2022
in gary cycholl's rx, a man assumes his deceased father's identity and medical license, skipping town after the funeral to drive across the country and disappear into one of the many holes in contemporary society that lost souls slip through. in a small town named assumption, he encounters a cast of appropriately kooky characters; meanwhile, someone is planting bombs in major american cities. this story of personal and national grief—and of one man taking the dictum "physician, heal thyself" a little too seriously—asks salient questions, but sacrifices readability for a thematic diffuse quality, for a prose full of holes, that never quite comes together the way it needs to.
the big problem here is exemplified by the book's selling copy. "A patient comes to you with vague but troubling symptoms. He seems to know a little too much about the odd sickness you’ve seen in other patients lately. You start to wonder what he’s been up to in his chicken coop. Is he growing the next plague? Should you call the FBI? The only problem is that you’re not really a doctor." — this is great! but the "odd sickness in other patients" doesn't really appear until 2/3s of the way into the book. to that point, i as a reader found myself meandering through the pages wondering when a clear direction would reveal itself. and of course this is a novel about meandering: our narrator is between identities, between places, trying faces on and then shuffling them off again. that's all well and good, but the narrator is so intangible, the scenes so fragmented and few between, especially in the first half, and the style so disjointed, that there's no real hook for the reader to latch onto and be pulled forward by. there's no there there, as they say, except for maybe the theoretical or critical implications. unfortunately man cannot live on theoretical or critical implications alone.
on the topic of style—i made a note to myself that there's only about three real scenes as part of the present action of the novel in the first seventy or so pages of the novel. the author is a poet, which makes sense. the prose is disjunct in a way that reminds us of the protagonist's dissociation from his family, his past, and a normative attitude toward society (i.e. committing medical and identity fraud), but it makes for a laboured reading experience, jumping between sentences that feel like non-sequiturs even when they're not, fighting against a current of imagery that cannot be imagined, piecing together the occasionally tortured grammar:
"How does a sexologist train? Chats with a string of locked-up deviants or a peek into deeper but closed suburban wounds? I imagined sitting across from my corps of deviants in a little, gray room, not blinking as they unwound their abdominal nerves in ceaseless tingles.”
"The radio was abuzz with the latest atrocity. Somebody had blown up a little piece of Disney—set off a bomb in Space Mountain in the park’s busiest season. Mora watched the video on my laptop—smoke poured from emergency exits as doors flew open along the rides and shows; first responders with bodies strapped onto rolling stretchers, flashing lights.”
"I took the long way to Mora’s place after a late afternoon thunderstorm. Water coursing through ditches. The world immediate and awhirl with moving substance. I reconsidered the bacteria that Mora and I’d made common to one another. Who was I, she? Who was I to see these things?”
it's frustrating because when the action does come together, for example in the sort-of-climactic chapter with the horse, it really does gel—the absurd humour, the oddball characters, the askew authorial eye, all of it. but otherwise unfortunately this one never quite took flight for me.
i would recommend rx to readers who enjoy staccato, improbable prose; thoughtful engagement with our contemporary apocalypse; a slow traipse toward small and large disasters. not my cup of tea, but maybe yours!
thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the ARC.
the big problem here is exemplified by the book's selling copy. "A patient comes to you with vague but troubling symptoms. He seems to know a little too much about the odd sickness you’ve seen in other patients lately. You start to wonder what he’s been up to in his chicken coop. Is he growing the next plague? Should you call the FBI? The only problem is that you’re not really a doctor." — this is great! but the "odd sickness in other patients" doesn't really appear until 2/3s of the way into the book. to that point, i as a reader found myself meandering through the pages wondering when a clear direction would reveal itself. and of course this is a novel about meandering: our narrator is between identities, between places, trying faces on and then shuffling them off again. that's all well and good, but the narrator is so intangible, the scenes so fragmented and few between, especially in the first half, and the style so disjointed, that there's no real hook for the reader to latch onto and be pulled forward by. there's no there there, as they say, except for maybe the theoretical or critical implications. unfortunately man cannot live on theoretical or critical implications alone.
on the topic of style—i made a note to myself that there's only about three real scenes as part of the present action of the novel in the first seventy or so pages of the novel. the author is a poet, which makes sense. the prose is disjunct in a way that reminds us of the protagonist's dissociation from his family, his past, and a normative attitude toward society (i.e. committing medical and identity fraud), but it makes for a laboured reading experience, jumping between sentences that feel like non-sequiturs even when they're not, fighting against a current of imagery that cannot be imagined, piecing together the occasionally tortured grammar:
"How does a sexologist train? Chats with a string of locked-up deviants or a peek into deeper but closed suburban wounds? I imagined sitting across from my corps of deviants in a little, gray room, not blinking as they unwound their abdominal nerves in ceaseless tingles.”
"The radio was abuzz with the latest atrocity. Somebody had blown up a little piece of Disney—set off a bomb in Space Mountain in the park’s busiest season. Mora watched the video on my laptop—smoke poured from emergency exits as doors flew open along the rides and shows; first responders with bodies strapped onto rolling stretchers, flashing lights.”
"I took the long way to Mora’s place after a late afternoon thunderstorm. Water coursing through ditches. The world immediate and awhirl with moving substance. I reconsidered the bacteria that Mora and I’d made common to one another. Who was I, she? Who was I to see these things?”
it's frustrating because when the action does come together, for example in the sort-of-climactic chapter with the horse, it really does gel—the absurd humour, the oddball characters, the askew authorial eye, all of it. but otherwise unfortunately this one never quite took flight for me.
i would recommend rx to readers who enjoy staccato, improbable prose; thoughtful engagement with our contemporary apocalypse; a slow traipse toward small and large disasters. not my cup of tea, but maybe yours!
thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the ARC.
January 20, 2022
Rx: A Novel by Garin Cycholl is one of those books that I am truly at a loss on how to review or recommend it. I'm not even sure how I feel about it.
I think the writing is largely what made me keep reading. It is really pretty straightforward for such unusual circumstances. I didn't find myself having to circle back because I might have missed something or misunderstood something. In some books that can be a positive but here it could have made me just stop. Because I could keep going I became interested in both the protagonist (I said interested in, not that I liked him exactly) and the feeling of 'what the hell will happen next.' It will help if the literary, cultural, and political allusions connect for you but I don't think it is essential.
Suspension of disbelief is necessary for almost every novel, but it can be tested here. If you can just let go you will be able to get more enjoyment from the book. While I believe most of the characters stop short of being stereotypes in the superficial sense, they do usually represent several of our (meaning our society's) quirks rolled into one. Kinda like a QAnon freak on acid.
If there is one thing that could disappoint some readers should they persevere to the end is, well, the end. like stories that don't necessarily tie everything up in a nice bow for me. This one not only doesn't have the bow, there isn't any wrapping paper either. That said, there is, for me, still a sense of (temporary?) closure.
All in all I would recommend this to readers who might enjoy a book as much for the social commentary as for the plot itself, as well as those who enjoy spending time in an improbable but still recognizable universe. Kinda like the years 2016-2020.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
I think the writing is largely what made me keep reading. It is really pretty straightforward for such unusual circumstances. I didn't find myself having to circle back because I might have missed something or misunderstood something. In some books that can be a positive but here it could have made me just stop. Because I could keep going I became interested in both the protagonist (I said interested in, not that I liked him exactly) and the feeling of 'what the hell will happen next.' It will help if the literary, cultural, and political allusions connect for you but I don't think it is essential.
Suspension of disbelief is necessary for almost every novel, but it can be tested here. If you can just let go you will be able to get more enjoyment from the book. While I believe most of the characters stop short of being stereotypes in the superficial sense, they do usually represent several of our (meaning our society's) quirks rolled into one. Kinda like a QAnon freak on acid.
If there is one thing that could disappoint some readers should they persevere to the end is, well, the end. like stories that don't necessarily tie everything up in a nice bow for me. This one not only doesn't have the bow, there isn't any wrapping paper either. That said, there is, for me, still a sense of (temporary?) closure.
All in all I would recommend this to readers who might enjoy a book as much for the social commentary as for the plot itself, as well as those who enjoy spending time in an improbable but still recognizable universe. Kinda like the years 2016-2020.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
February 12, 2022
This was…. Not good. It was disjointed and hard to follow. Aside from the “assuming dad’s identity” plot, nothing in the blurb (which is what got me hyped about this book) showed up until about 60% of the way into the book. None of the individual threads of the plot were anything more than loosely smushed together into an imitation of a knot. I got the feeling that this was supposed to be in the vein of a Chuck Palahnuik novel, but it was just too messy to even come close.
April 26, 2022
As a pharmacist, I had to get this for the title alone. The description sounded great and the first few chapters really grabbed me. Then it slowly devolved into a repetitive and aimless mess with characters whose motivations made no coherent sense. There were a handful of beautiful sentences scattered throughout to warrant a bump up to 2 stars.
December 14, 2022
This novel is great fun, and it raises important social and political questions. A novel of place and of finding place.
November 29, 2023
In Rx, a man assumes his recently deceased father’s identity as a doctor, heading out on the road with his equipment and blank prescription pads (yikes!) He finds himself in a small town with an eclectic group of people and starts “practicing” in a small clinic. Due to the fact that he doesn’t have any formal medical training, he does his best to lend an ear to help patients but not going so far as to harm them. I enjoyed meeting all the colorful characters- not all likable
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews