Over the course of his sixteen years Charles Cullen had been the subject of dozens of complaints and disciplinary citations, and had endured four police investigations, two lie detector tests, perhaps twenty suicide attempts, and a lock-up, but none had blemished his professional record.For The Good Nurse, investigative journalist Charles Graeber spent nearly ten years conducting exclusive jailhouse interviews with Charles Cullen – presumed to be America's most prolific serial killer – as well as enjoying access to his family, police records, and the confidential informant who eventually brought him down. With such a wealth of time and information, I would have expected an in-depth look at what creates a psychopath like Cullen, but disappointingly, the biographical side of Cullen's story is sorely lacking. There's a huge difference between the first half of this book – in which the childhood, education, marriage and working life of Cullen is lightly sketched – and the second half – in which the final police investigation starts and Graeber could include detailed scenes based off of videotapes and transcripts. This contrast only serves to highlight how little insight there is into the man that Cullen is – which is frustrating, but not fatal to the story. On the other hand, the actual writing drove me crazy. Often overwritten, feeling out of place with the serious subject matter:
He drank alone in the basement, avoiding his wife. He liked it there. There was only one way in, nobody below, bedrock all around, always dark. The boiler room was a place to drink and think and watch the pilot light dance within its metal prison.Or using a curiously specific phrase, that once again made the facts feel overwritten, like “The day after tax day, 1993, Charlie Cullen was transferred (to the Greystone Psychiatric Hospital) for intensive inpatient treatment.” The day after tax day? Why not “April 16th”? Since there was a footnote following that statement, I followed the footnote and was dumbfounded to find the caveat, “Sources conflict as to the exact dates of his treatment”. So then why use the curiously specific phrase The day after tax day? How does that not undermine the nonfiction intent? And sometimes, I questioned Graeber's grasp of the English language:
Charlie explained all this as he applied the electrodes to the taut ribcages of the elderly, the dry eraser nipples, the merkin of hair.I am confused by what is meant by the phrase “dry eraser nipples” (as in dried out pink rubber pencil erasers or the black felt scrubbers for a dry-erase board?), but I really question whether Graeber actual meant to use the word “merkin” in reference to these elderly patients (as in merkin: an artificial hairpiece for the pudendum; a pubic wig). As these are fairly random early examples of the writing, I'll let them stand for the whole of the book, whose subject matter deserved better.
It's too bad that we don't get much insight into why Cullen felt compelled to randomly kill patients in his care with overdoses (his unhappy childhood is more referred to than outlined, and as presented, isn't even the unhappiest childhood referred to in the book), but The Good Nurse is a damning indictment of a profit-driven health-care system in which hospitals found it better for their reputations to fire a suspicious fellow like Cullen rather than open themselves up to liability by admitting to actual homicides being committed by their staff. Gaeber isn't afraid to name institutions and the executives therein who covered up their suspicions (including destroying files and lying to police investigators), and that in itself makes this book an important public record. In the end, Cullen confessed to murdering forty patients in his care but he may be responsible for up to four hundred deaths. In a very literal way, the health care systems of Pennsylvania and New Jersey are culpable in a large percentage of these homicides; Cullen was under a cloud of suspicion from the very start and every hospital that fired him was simply kicking Cullen down the road to the next hospital where he would kill again and again.
I wish The Good Nurse was better written but I do appreciate what I was able to learn from it. Three stars can be considered a rounding-up.
