Abraham Verghese, photo by Christopher Michel
After our entire book club, with unprecedented unanimity, pronounced Cutting for Stone the best book we had read yet, we waited twelve long years. Every few months, one of us would ask, “Hey, has Verghese written his next book yet?” Finally, The Covenant of Water came out.
The man is a consummate storyteller. This hardly seems fair to the rest of us, when he is a physician whose specialties are supposed to be infectious disease and pulmonary medicine. A distinguished professor at Stanford’s medical school, he only went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop—showing up in his doctorly tweeds and feeling utterly out of place—after caring for AIDS patients wrung him dry. He needed a way to tell their stories.
He found that and more. Few contemporary writers offer such rich sensory details, memorable characters, and compassionate depth. Did he learn all that in Iowa, I wondered last week, en route to his sold-out Q&A at the St. Louis County Library headquarters. Or is it because he is a physician? Could any trained observer who sees people at their most vulnerable turn into a modern-day griot?
I wanted Verghese to spill the techniques, tell us his tricks. So did Julie Schuster, CEO of Classic 107.3, who was onstage to toss questions at him. From his answers, mine slowly emerged.
First, I think I know why, as lovely as Covenant is, Cutting for Stone swept me along more powerfully. Verghese grew up in Ethiopia, where Cutting for Stone is set. He knew its language and land intimately. He spent summers in Kerala, in southern India, where Covenant is set. But he had hesitated to set a novel there—until his niece asked his mother what life was like when she was five years old.
Verghese’s mother was taken aback. She had spent her adult life as a teacher in Ethiopia, and those were remote memories. But she started to write anecdotes of her childhood in a succession of notebooks. And when her son read them, he was struck with the placeness, the absolute idiosyncracy and wonder of Kerala. And so you have this beautiful book, written from a slight distance. The power still present, but more imagined than felt. Luckily for us, Verghese imagines with pure intensity. Plus, he had his ninety-year-old mom as research assistant.
Was he perhaps drawn to water, Schuster probed. “Not particularly,” he said. “It just was a fact of the geography.” With 44 rivers streaming down from the mountains to the ocean, water was an inevitable metaphor, a character in its own right.
How did he manage to write such a complex story, spanning seven decades and a large cast of characters, Schuster asked. Ah, I thought, here come the techniques.
“I’m kind of embarrassed to talk about my writing,” he responded, “because I envy writers who know the whole story. John Irving, who has become a friend and a mentor, knows the first and last line of every book he’s going to write before he writes it.” If Verghese didn’t already know the whole story, Irving warned him, “then you’re not a writer, you’re just an ordinary liar.”
Verghese relayed this comment to the gentler Michael Ondaatje, who “laughed and said, ‘I don’t do it that way, but there is a point in the writing where I arrive at the point where I know as much as John knows before he begins.” Which cheered Verghese, because all he knew of Covenant at the time was that it would be set in southern India and would span three generations. Why that long? Because as a doctor, he had watched “things we only knew names for” deepen into an understanding of causes, then treatments. Surely the same could happen for people?
Surely, but what about technique?
“I had this wonderful whiteboard in my room,” he offered, “where I laid out the whole story, and I thought I’m better off this time…. But the characters would announce to me that they were not going to do that.” Much of what unfolded, he never could have known in advance, he said, and I got the sense he secretly prefers it that way.
So, an intuitive writer. Also, one who has moved across cultures, religions, languages. When Schuster asked, drawing from a passage in Covenant, “Do you have a place that your body recognizes as home?” he looked out at his Midwestern audience, many of us still living in the city where our grandparents were born, and confided, “I wrote that scene out of envy.” He has never felt a sense of geographic home, he said. His life has never been structured around “whatever the rituals are, Friday night football or possum pie….” At least, I think he said possum pie; the audience was laughing too hard for me to be sure. It was a crack that could have sounded snide, if he had not been so sincere.
Verghese has “a sense of how powerful it is to have a home, an ancestral home, a sense of the land being yours. A sense of not just ownership but that you are molded by the land.” He firmly believes the old truism that “geography is destiny.” His parents went to Ethiopia because there were no jobs to be had, and he often pictures his mother as a young woman in a sari, bravely setting out on a steamship. “Because they changed their geography, my destiny changed…and my life was very different than theirs.
“Coming to America had a profound sense of changing one’s destiny,” he continued, adding that it is being here that has given him the courage to write. “America gives the immigrant their voice.” Was the collective intake of breath my imagination? No, because a second later, the crowd burst into applause.
Schuster pressed on, as curious as I. In Covenant, “elements of the paranormal are mentioned matter-of-factly,” she remarked, “but do you believe in the paranormal?”
“I get asked that a fair amount—am I engaging in magic realism?” he said. “But honestly, I was just being true to the times.” His grandmother spoke of curses and blessings as real things, as concrete as a sidewalk. “I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” Verghese added, “and when he wrote his autobiography, I was so curious to read it, because I wanted to know where this magic realism came from. And his autobiography read just like his novels. He was not so much creating a new genre as being true to the way his characters saw the world.”
Okay, what about subconscious forces driving Verghese’s storytelling?
“I have a thesis: as a writer I merely provide the words,” he said. “The reader provides the imagination.” The process, in other words, is collaborative. “I’ve even had master’s theses sent to me where they talk about my use of Jungian archetypes, and I always think, oh my God, if only I was that clever! There’s so much that readers read into it, which is delightful for me. And sometimes I’m not even aware consciously of why I put certain things in there.”
At least, not until someone else points it out. “In Cutting for Stone, there’s a scene where the gynecologist is traveling on a plane, and the pilot fakes this emergency so he can land and deliver this stimulant drug.” The scene was based on an incident Verghese remembered from childhood, a plane stopping for a similar reason and his mother “pitching a fit.” In the book, a little boy falls in the aisle and breaks his leg. “I have him clutching this little toy plane, and my brother told me that during that whole trip I was clutching a toy plane.”
So there is a technique: mine your past, or let it bubble up. But surely every writer does that? I was still waiting, and his formal responses were over. There was an audience Q&A, though. I perked up when a sleep physician asked if his stories ever came to him in dreams.
“I can’t remember dreaming about situations with one exception,” he said. “I had the most vivid dream one night that I was HIV infected. And I woke up with such relief. Even though I thought I could put myself in someone’s shoes, it was such a revelation to me.”
Now, I thought, we are getting to the heart of it. And I was convinced a moment later, when Schuster asked about the emotional distance required to be a physician, and Verghese looked blank. “I think that’s an old trope,” he said gently, “about maintaining a distance, and I actually think it’s incorrect. When I see a medical student moved to tears on the ward, I know that’s a good physician being born. Now obviously you don’t want to cloud their judgment if there’s an emergency…. But I’ve always felt that’s overdone, that whole sense of ‘keep your distance.’ There’s something inhuman about not being moved by the things you see.”
Verghese has had what he calls “the great privilege” of getting to know people at their most vulnerable, miserable, despairing or desperate times. He has spent decades sensing and imagining their physical and emotional pain. He once suggested that we think of every illness as a narrative, “a story in the body.” And that story is always bigger than the physical.
“You can’t even tell your spouse about it, except in abstract terms,” he remarked. “There’s a desire to do more. In some way I suspect the writing represents that frustrated sense of keeping stories inside.”
As they tumble out, he hands each a measure of his own empathy. His characters care for one another through all manner of hardship, and they fight through difference to understanding. Nothing is irreconcilable.
And this is his trick. No gimmicks, no fancy writer’s-workshop tips, just the old-fashioned virtue of immense empathy, deepened by curiosity, compassion, and a sense that we must connect.
Another doctor raised her hand. “I had an arranged marriage,” she said. “All my American friends are all omg, what in the world, you didn’t know him? Did you sleep with him the first night?’ Can you elaborate a little?” Laughter rippled through the room.
“It leads me to tell you something that hasn’t come up in our discussion,” he said. “It was a gamble to begin a novel that was going to be read in the western world with a twelve-year-old girl on her wedding day. But my great grandmother got married that young, to a widower, and they went on to have this rollicking marriage.” He said he wanted to play with expectations and show that a marriage that looked so unlikely can succeed. He also thought of the women in his family and “wanted to pay tribute to that kind of quiet heroism, that strength.” Both his grandmothers lost children. “They had weathered incredible storms, and yet they were incredible sources of strength for their families. They were sustained by their faith, and I found myself envious of that.”
Finally, the most delightful question: “I wondered if you are a romantic, because this book is three love stories, powerful love stories that are sustained over time. So talk to us about love!”
He was game. “I’m really drawn to the emotional sides of our experiences,” he began. “I’m drawn to the ineffable, to what isn’t easily quantified and measured. We change our lives because of love.” Not the falling in love, he added swiftly. Not that biochemical spell of infatuation. But the steadfast love that emerges later. “In that sense, I guess I am a romantic. Never thought about myself that way. But family interests me greatly. Tensions in the family, the challenges to them, the rupture of family. You use the word ‘romantic,’ but how can one not be interested in all this?”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
