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Golden Ghouls
| Article
# : |
18375 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
2,763 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
A BED BY THE WINDOW
A Novel of Mystery and Redemption
M. Scott Peck
Bantam Books
306 pp., $18.95
“That's one of the troubles with people,” Georgia continued… “They think of us patients in a nursing home as people who are already dead. They don't think of us as having real lives. They don't even think of us as being capable committing murder.”
Lieutenant Petri sat back thoughtfully. He had gotten used to the fact that when he had come into Willow Glen [nursing home] he had wandered into a territory quite foreign to him. Now it was also beginning to dawn on him that he had wandered into it with a lot of preconceptions.
Readers of A Bed by the Window may feel much the same way. Not only does the novel take us into the unusual setting of a nursing home, a place we may dread even to think on, it also upsets our own preconceptions about far more than the world of the old and infirm. On a surface level, the novel is a mystery, and an exciting one at that, centering on the murder of a hideously deformed and completely paralyzed genius, Stephen Solaris, a man gifted with insight into the hearts of those who come in contact with him. The nursing home setting, however, is but the stage for the exploration of more profound and complex mysteries than the identity of the killer. It is a place where death is always close; and the proximity of death, as Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, can concentrate the mind. Or, as Willow Glen's chief administrator Edith Simonton, tells the detective, “Things tend to become a bit more focused when you're close to death.” The nearness of death raises for both characters and the reader ultimate questions about good and evil and about the meaning and value of life. These mysteries are the novel's real subject.
Religion, psychology, and ultimate concerns
Historically it has been the function of religions to frame a worldview that offers a sense of ultimate meaning in the face of chaotic events such as unmerited suffering and, of course, death. But as traditional religions, particularly Christianity, exert less influence over the minds of educated Westerners, the reality of death raises the haunting specter of meaninglessness. In response, our society to an unusual degree ignores death. In Western Attitudes Toward Death French
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