Down from Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age

Recounting his life and work, a surgeon and essayist describes his Depression-era boyhood in New York State, his dual career as doctor and writer, the death of his father, and more. 25,000 first printing.

With a physician's eye and an artist's vision, Selzer ( Confessions of a Knife ) traces the arc of his life from his 1930s childhood in Troy, N.Y., through his medical training and career as a surgeon in New Haven, Conn., to his retirement in 1985. He returns again and again here to his boyhood home near Albany, where he lived with his artistic mother, a singer who expected him to become a writer, his admired older brother Billy and his father, a general practitioner, "one of a dozen or so who presided over the physical breakdown of the Trojans exacerbated by the poverty of the Great Depression." The sooty, pre-electronics age of Troy, with its cobblestone streets, horse-drawn hearses, saloons and brothels, is evoked with affection and irony as Selzer highlights the house calls and hospital visits he made with his father, whose death when the boy was 12 confirmed his own calling to medicine. In prose that breathes with life ("One enters the body in surgery as in love . . ."), Selzer also details his life in medicine, describing a wrenching malpractice suit and an encounter with an AIDS patient who sought help with suicide.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Superbly skilled writer/surgeon Selzer (Imagine a Woman, 1990, etc.) cracks open his psyche's sternum, showing us his heart repairs, then goes about sewing up the wounds while they are still dotted with blood. Now 64, Selzer didn't start writing seriously until he was 40, then retired at 58 to write full time. He finds many likenesses between surgery and writing: ``Writing, like doctoring, has nothing to do with cleverness. It is all diagnosis and feeling....'' His father and mother dominate this memoir, and he's greatly happy that he has fulfilled both their dreams. His mother, a singer forever bursting into arias around the house (even as Selzer here bursts into warblings and subtly shaded songs about yellow meadows of fat and maroon- and salmon-colored inner organs), wanted him to be an artist; his father, a general practitioner, took young Selzer around with him on his house calls and inducted him into the healing art. Much of what Selzer remembers here takes place in his hometown of Troy, N.Y., where prostitution flourished as a leading business during the Depression. Selzer's father doctored to the whores at the Selzer home, and after his death Selzer heard from an aunt that his father was a great womanizer with these clients. In fact, only after his parents' deaths has Selzer faced many family skeletons. His mother's death at 88 and burial in the rain is movingly told: ``There was the trench, like a socket from which the tooth had been pulled. Then the ancient spectacle, full of murmuring and slow gestures. The village of black umbrellas.'' It's his widower mother's attractiveness to suitors that frees Selzer to show us her history as a teenage waterfront songstress, with hints of darker, more reckless days. A marvel as Selzer gives every pain its name--though his nonreading mother called his books all lies. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the author of Confessions of a Knife ( LJ 9/1/79) and Taking the World in for Repairs ( LJ 12/86) comes a poignant, elegiac memoir of his childhood in Troy, New York, as well as formative experiences in Korea and New Haven. While several sections of the book cover familiar ground for Selzer fans, such as his description of the similarities between surgery and writing ("In surgery there is a scalpel, in writing, a pen"), the rest is a heartbreakingly personal reflection on his mother and father--a woman who once sang in dance halls and a man who was a solid old general practitioner with a black bag and a sense of wonder. The city of Troy is a supporting character, described with a perception so acute as to be photographic. This is a terrible beauty of a book, full of love and pain and a palpable rich sadness that will stay with a reader forever. Selzer's finest work; highly recommended for most collections.
- Mark L. Shelton, Athens, Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.