Thomas, there will always be an unanswerable question at the core of everything; there will always be a shoe on the roof. This world of ours is murky and filled with wonders, and there are fibers of mystery clinging to everything. Better to live with this ambiguity than try to deny it, I say.The Shoe on the Roof opens with an apparently true story: A woman who died during surgery, and who was eventually revived, described to her doctors an experience of having left her body; floating above the operating table and entering a glorious tunnel of light. When her doctors explained the scientific processes behind her experience, she accepted their explanation and mused about how real the experience had seemed to her: right down to the dirty tennis shoe on the hospital roof that she had noted in passing towards the heavens. When the doctors sent a janitor onto the roof, he found the shoe exactly where the patient had reported seeing it. As a metaphor, this story seems perfectly suited to the heart of this book's narrative – an exploration of science versus faith and those things that can't be rationally explained – but ultimately, I don't think that author Will Ferguson really embraced his own metaphor, and I ended less than satisfied.
After the shoe on the roof story we meet the main character: Thomas Rosanoff – a womanising, self-absorbed, Harvard neuro-med student – and the woman who will break his heart: Amy, a free-spirited artist of deep Catholic faith. In an effort to win Amy back, (doubting) Thomas discovers that her brother has been institutionalised for believing himself to be Jesus Christ (a delusion that gripped Sebastian while he was training for the priesthood), and thinking that he could cure Amy's beloved brother, Thomas impersonates his own father (a world-famous psychiatrist who edits The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and brings Sebastian to his own apartment, along with two homeless men who also believe themselves to be the Messiah; surely their rational minds will take over when they realise they can't all be right. Thomas' research has long focussed on disproving the existence of God – in particular, by locating the areas of the brain that reinforce faith and reward belief – so his character can be interpreted to represent the surgeons in the shoe on the roof story: the rational voice of scientific reason. Amy is devout (but mostly absent from the book), Thomas' godmother is a nun who gives medical aid to the homeless, this Sister Frances had met Thomas' mother in a convent before the woman left to marry Thomas' father (but since she died when Thomas was three, she had no religious influence on her son), and the three Jesuses quote prayer and scripture, but if these characters are the representatives of the awe-filled experience of God in the shoe on the roof story, it's pretty weak stuff. As Thomas works with the three men, his father gets involved and the story begins to explore the over-medication of mental illness, the questionable morality of closing asylums and relegating patients to the streets, and the basic mystery of the human mind: if there is nothing structurally wrong with the brain itself, and if this pill or this device or this therapy can't break a delusion, where does the illness lie? So far as I can figure, the mystery of mental illness is the “shoe on the roof” that defies rational explanation, but that's what wasn't satisfying to me: this could have been so much more.
As for the writing: Ferguson is considered a humourist, and there were many amusing exchanges and observations. There is much more to the plot than what I have reduced it to above, and extensive research was evident; there is even a mystery stalking the homeless in Tent City. And while I did appreciate many of Ferguson's turns-of-phrase, I often found his metaphors jarring:
New England in autumn. Blue skies. Air as crisp as celery stalks snapped in two. A dry wind, stirring the trees. Leaves spiralling down: deep reds and unrhymable orange, twirling on eddies, layering the streets.I like “air as crisp as celery stalks snapped in two”, but roll my eyes at “unrhymable orange”. I definitely didn't like the following:
An overstuffed laundry hamper in one corner was spilling clothes like the world's worst piñata.Yet, I did like the following:
Memory is the hotel curtain that never completely closes. Memory always lets in just enough light to fill the room and ruin your sleep.So, if I wasn't blown away by the big picture or the individual lines, this feels like a miss for me; a totally average read.
