Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in American Studies and English at Hillsdale College where he taught for over 32 years.  Prior to retirement, he was Kirk Distinguished Professor in American Studies. He’s relocated from Michigan to South Carolina.

These days one can enroll in creative writing programs with coursework or workshops in narrative medicine, poetic medicine, expressive writing and even medical humanities.

It’s an interesting notion likely connected to “coming of age” stories, “family dynamics” stories, all to be told with within expansive and insightful narratives which apply to all fields of “work” and of course what it means to be human with an examined life. Storytellers, after all, are interpreters in professional and cultural environments.

What would be the point?

Narrative as healthcare can be the point especially since stories help build empathy, mindfulness, and are diagnostic tools.  Imagine for a moment a healthcare professional addressing an illness.  How quick and easy to venture into remote hypotheticals.  How better to address the illness through narrative, the interior experience of deep inquiry, confronting the illness as a story.

I mention this since it seems the way to address a review of Sara Baker’s The Timekeeper’s Son, a novel which asks the reader to recognize, absorb, interpret, and bear witness to a young man’s “difference” and his family’s dysfunction.

Why?

It can be used to explain motivation, even what organizes a novel’s plot or narrative development.

Here’s some context. I once sat with a student attempting something basic—how to use a dictionary.  It was fundamental, alphabet, phonetics, and a dictionary entry.  I gave the young man a word and then handed him the dictionary with the simple request: Look for the word which I had just sounded out.

He was flummoxed and looked at me and said, sweetly, “I don’t know how to use the air conditioner.”  The issue was severe dyslexia.

There’s a kinship between this small narrative and Sara Baker’s novel: In a Georgia small town, Josh Lovejoy, whose aspiration in life is to become a filmmaker, drives home late at night uncharacteristically “high.”  Accidentally he hits a jogger, David Masters, placing him in a coma.  In all likelihood, Josh owns some hidden disabilities, living as he also does in a fragile household.

The incident is shattering, more so because Josh is already estranged from his father, who sees little value in Josh’s aspirations.  The consequence of living with a “distant” father is Josh’s loneliness and lack of self-worth.

He’s adrift at an important moment in his life and culpable for the accident.  He takes up his court-ordered community service while waiting to see if his culpability will change when and if David Masters dies.  Josh works at the Good Shepherd School for Disabled Children.

Baker places the reader, then, in the heart and soul of a troubled young man; the plot, however, is diagnostic, addressing not only the Josh’s “troubles” but the delicate equilibrium of his family and the Masterses’ family.

It’s a “case study,” in other words; Josh’s father is a clockmaker whose sense of things is more devoted to the timepieces he keeps running but with the same disinterestedness he brings to his family life.  His “shop” is the place to which he retreats.  Josh’s mother, on the other hand, is equally preoccupied if not depressive.

In the novel’s time, then, as those hidden disabilities and wounds emerge against the background of the claims and limits of community, Josh faces a certain kind of annihilation which would include the “good” that’s in his heart.