Gob's Grief

Chris Adrian's debut novel Gob's Grief is not so much a book about the Civil War as it is about how people cope with the terrible loss and grief caused by the war. It is a book not of battles and generals, but of spirit voices, regret, and madness.

A postwar America riven by social upheaval, reevaluation of accepted values, and radical politics provides the setting for the suffragists, spiritualists, and walking wounded who populate the book. Walt Whitman is at the spiritual center of their audacious effort to undo the war's devastation. He establishes the tone of wistful sadness that propels the first chapters, in which he works to comfort wounded soldiers at the army hospitals in Washington City. During a visit to New York City in1868 he befriends a brilliant young doctor, George Washington "Gob" Woodhull, who is consumed with grief over the death of his brother in the war.

Gob, in turn, befriends Will Fie while the two are studying medicine at New York's Bellevue Hospital. The men belong to a "not very exclusive club of surviving brothers"-Will also has lost a brother to the war and suffers the same survivor's guilt that drives Gob to madness. While a soldier in the Union army, Will takes up with a French photographer who follows the army like a vulture, making photographs of the battle carnage. After the Frenchman is killed, Will inherits a grisly collection of photos that so sensitize him to the world's ills that he begins to see ghosts all around him.