Love and Fatigue in America

by Roger King

Overview

Love and Fatigue in America records an Englishman’s decade-long journey through his newly adopted country in the company of a mystifying illness and a charismatic dog.
    When he receives an unexpected invitation from an unfamiliar American university, he embraces it as a triumphant new beginning. Instead, on arrival, he is stricken with a persistent inability to stand up or think straight, and things quickly go wrong. Diagnosed with ME disease—chronic fatigue syndrome—he moves restlessly from state to state, woman to woman, and eccentric doctor to eccentric doctor, in a search for a love and a life suited to his new condition. The journey is simultaneously brave, absurd, and instructive.
    Finding himself prostrate on beds and couches from Los Alamos to Albany, he hears the intimate stories offered by those he encounters—their histories, hurts, and hopes—and from these fragments an unsentimental map emerges of the inner life of a nation. Disability has shifted his interest in America from measuring its opportunities to taking the measure of its humanity. Forced to consider for himself the meaning of a healthy life and how best to nurture it, he incidentally delivers a report on the health of a country.
    By turns insightful, comic, affecting, and profound, Roger King’s Love and Fatigue in America briskly compresses an illness, a nation, and an era through masterly blending of literary forms. In a work that defies categorization, and never loses its pace or poise, the debilitated narrator is, ironically, the most lively and fully awake figure in the book.

“Remarkable. . . . [S]mart and funny. . . .[A]musing observations about everything American. . . . [T]his is not a traditional novel. . . . [T]his, as it turns out, is a brilliant perspective from which to view and write about life. . . . [G]reat reckonings unfurl in mere paragraphs.”—Jackson Newspapers.com
“As the disease drives the narrator city to city, woman to woman, and doctor to doctor, it brings into relief many of America’s follies and excesses, most notably our health-care system, which King portrayed as antiquated, bureaucratic, and inhumane. After more than fifteen years, America brings the narrator ‘not aspiration realized, nor a largeness of life fitting to its open spaces, but the nascent ability to be satisfied with less.’”—The New Yorker

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299287238
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	03/26/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	254
File size:	518 KB

About the Author

Roger King grew up in London. He is author of four previous novels: Horizontal Hotel, Written on a Stranger’s Map, Sea Level, and A Girl from Zanzibar. He has worked extensively in Africa and Asia and has held university posts in both international development and creative writing. Since 1991 he has suffered from ME disease, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. He lives in Leverett, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note Washington State, 1900–1991  New Mexico, 1991–1994 California 1994–1997 Other States, 1997 Massachusetts, 1997– Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

When invited to teach at a university in Spokane, Washington, the unnamed British narrator of King's (Horizontal Hotel) extraordinary autobiographical novel heads eagerly toward the promise of the American West. However, after collapsing in the gym and being diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome—comprising "a rag-tag gang of misfit symptoms"—he and his loyal dog Arthur find themselves untethered, drifting across the country searching for somewhere to settle. His travels take him from doctor to ineffective doctor, from hospitable hosts to anonymous motels, and from bed to couch and back again as he struggles to find, at 40, who he is and what he's become. Although his romantic relationships fail, he does enjoy moments of startling tenderness: the undemanding love of Mary and her young daughter Zoe, who linger long in his heart; the flickering kindness of waitresses; and the unexpected intimacy granted him at a lingerie shop. What finally offers solace and meaning here is not to be found in biology or fate—although the narrator often feels crushed beneath both—but compassion. Throughout his domestic happiness in New Mexico, the dizzying energy of youth and sex in San Francisco, and the peace of a cabin in smalltown Massachusetts, the narrator's exhaustion never infects the writing. The narrative expertly cobbles together unexpected moments of poetry; meditations on illness, war, and ambition; and vignettes, which—like the narrator himself—alternately admit devastating failures and sing with triumph. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Roger King’s disturbing, delightful odyssey encompasses many subjects—love, loss, health, illness, disconnection, and most of all the modern American psyche: its roots and its rootlessness. A profound and wonderfully original book.”—Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index

“Few writers dare to try the scope of Roger King, from the intensely personal to the universal, and even fewer succeed. But King does. Love and Fatigue in America manages to offer three rewarding narratives at once in a book that is equally novel and memoir. He has done something astonishing.”—Helen Benedict, author of Sand Queen

“What does it mean to live in between? Not only between geographical locations, but between health and illness, commitment and freedom, love and loss? In this wry and subtle autobiographical novel, Roger King maps the territory of his inner life onto the American continent. The genre-crossing result is, like the work of W.G. Sebald, surprising and dazzling.”—Andrea Barrett, author of The Air We Breathe and winner of the National Book Award

“This is a terrific book. It defies categorization. It reminds me, in its fierce but mysterious organization, of the best works that reach far and wide in subject matter, and far and wide in mode. I think of Sebald’s moody books here, and Didion’s White Album.”—Brian D. Bouldrey, author of Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica

“Love and Fatigue in America is a beautifully written, brave, and at times almost brutally honest story of the author’s struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome. The writing is both spare and poetically evocative. It is a polished and moving work of literature.”—Jennifer Moses, author of Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou

“[An] extraordinary autobiographical novel. . . . The narrative expertly cobbles together unexpected moments of poetry; meditations on illness, war, and ambition; and vignettes, which—like the narrator himself—alternately admit devastating failures and sing with triumph.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The book is fiction, but King’s use of first-person captures a real man—one with authentic, flawed retrospective recall. The novel reads a little bit like a diary, including a few steamy love scenes and witty, observant notes on topics as diverse as strippers, military life, and ambition. . . . King’s well-crafted book raises important questions about how our society treats sick people. What happened to the narrator could happen to anyone. Perhaps the book could help inspire a remedy for a healthcare system that doesn’t seem very caring.”—Research 1st



“King fashions a rich, compelling, and often wry narrative out of a set of circumstances that could quite easily fatigue the reader’s interest or sympathy. Pithily but not self-pitifully, he captures ‘the labor of being sick in America’, the psychology and stigma of disease, as well as the essences of places and personalities (one man ‘peppers his talk with little challenges to maintain the upper hand’) in the foreign land he now calls home.”—Eric J. Iannelli, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher