With Choices, Noah Gordon brings to a close his great trilogy spanning the generations of the Cole medical dynasty. Beginning with the legendary 11thcentury doctor Robert J. Cole, each eldest son has borne the same name and middle initial, and some have possessed the uncanny “sixth sense” known as The Gift—the terrible and instinctive knowledge that someone is about to die. In Choices, it emerges again in the present, but this time in a daughter, Roberta Jeanne d’Arc Cole, known as R.J. She defies her beloved father when she chooses to study law rather than medicine, yet destiny is to overtake her when she realizes that she has inherited The Gift. As she holds the hands of a sick man, R.J. feels a dreadful certainty that he is going to die. Tragically, he is her own lover. Struggling with her grief, R.J. knows she must bow to the inevitable and become a physician. But her life changes when she moves to a smalltown practice and is faced with a terrible dilemma.
It seems as though Dr. R.J. Cole has it all: a thriving career and a chance for a major promotion on the path to chief of staff at her prominent Boston hospital, a husband who is also a distinguished doctor, an elegant house on Cambridge's famous Brattle Street, and a country home in the Berkshires. As the tale unfolds, however, R.J.'s life emerges as dismal and lonely; her marriage is loveless, and Tom has been having an affair; her work at an abortion clinic is controversial, leading to the selection of another physician for what should have been her new position; and the stress of city life and the impersonal style of urban hospitals (allowing little sustained contact with patients) are making her wonder why she ever turned from her first career, law. When she and Tom divorce, R.J. announces to her two best friends, her longtime assistant, and her dad—another of a long line of doctors in the Cole family—that she will be making a radical life change. She decides not to sell her country house as originally planned but to move in and set up a family practice: it's in a part of state where doctors are few and far between. Once out in wild and woolly western Massachusetts, she finds (at least for a time) the love she has been craving, but the real gain of her migration is what she has been most conspicuously lacking in her life—a renewed sense of purpose.
Perhaps Gordon's best work so far; the pace is even, and R.J. is a heroine worth caring about.
Overview
With Choices, Noah Gordon brings to a close his great trilogy spanning the generations of the Cole medical dynasty. Beginning with the legendary 11thcentury doctor Robert J. Cole, each eldest son has borne the same name and middle initial, and some have possessed the uncanny “sixth sense” known as The Gift—the terrible and instinctive knowledge that someone is about to die. In Choices, it emerges again in the present, but this time in a daughter, Roberta Jeanne d’Arc Cole, known as R.J. She defies her beloved ...