Book Review: The Surgeon’s Wife By William H. Coles

The Surgeon’s Wife by William H. Coles is a fiction story about the downfall of a prominent New Orleans surgeon, Clayton Otherson. The story is told in the third person, with different chapters describing the evolving story from the perspective of a number of different characters. The character whose perspective is used the most is Mike Boudreaux, Clayton’s younger protégé, who is Chief of Service at the hospital where they both work. Over the course of the story, Clayton makes a number of errors in judgment during surgeries, which place his patients at risk, leaving Mike to comprehend how to take disciplinary action against his former mentor. Concurrently, Clayton’s wife Catherine reveals to Mike she is unhappy in her marriage and turns to him for emotional support.

This new relationship angers Clayton and further jeopardizes his relationship with Mike, his family and community, to devastating effect. I like the basic premise of this story. It raises the question of what difficulties may be encountered when one excels past their mentor, into a position of seniority, and is subsequently responsible for supervising them. This includes issuing them with sanctions when they perform poorly. Clayton’s character-arc is also plausible, spiraling into jealousy and vengeance when his hard-won reputation is compromised by claims of incompetence. Unfortunately, however, these strong foundational ideas cannot bear the weight of the book’s shortcomings. There are a lot of characters and plot points in this story. There would be enough plot to fill a 500-page novel with ease, and this novel is only 190-pages long. What belongs in those 300 missing pages is crucial scene-setting, description and character development.

The book is littered with lost opportunities to develop the main character, Mike. The author tries to paint Mike as a smart, dependable and all-round nice guy (a familiar, if not a great main character), but I never got enough insight into his emotional state to invest in him. The same goes for the other characters. Five different characters have chapters written from their perspectives, which is a lot for a book of this size. It means there is no room left for meaningful exploration of the three most important characters’ feelings and experiences, which I would have loved to learn more about. The plot is very ambitious and action-oriented, with multiple dramatic climaxes taking place. Unfortunately, a lack of foreshadowing means these crises seem to appear out of thin air. Scene-setting is sparse, making it difficult to form an accurate picture of what is taking place.

The author relies on huge swathes of virtually uninterrupted dialogue to advance the story, making it seem as though his characters exist completely independent of the world around them. There are many nameless ancillary characters that feel contrived, and the relationships don’t feel realistic, with characters often announcing their feelings to one another with undeserved familiarity. Throughout the book, I found myself wishing the author would use more descriptive language, which he proves at certain points, he has an affinity for. In terms of language, there are some medical terms and references specific to the region of New Orleans that go unexplained, which left me feeling confused. There are also some problems with grammar, with the author using ellipses instead of commas and colons instead of full-stops, along with some formatting inconsistencies. Three color drawings appear, one at the beginning of each of the book’s three sections. These drawings struck me as out of place in a novel and contributed to my conclusion that the book does not appear to have been professionally-edited. Owing to the above-mentioned problems, I give The Surgeon’s Wife 1 out of 4 stars. Though this story has potential, in its current state I would not recommend it to anyone.