Staff Reviews

Webster’s first and second definitions of comedy include happy endings, while its third defines it as “a ludicrous or farcical event or series of events.” According to Webster then, Awad’s sizzling novel is indeed a comedy—albeit a dark one. I howled with laughter as I read All’s Well. But with remembered pain, too, as I followed untenured Shakespeare professor Miranda Fitch through not only a student production of “All’s Well That Ends Well,” the rebellion of said students and their ultimate determination to put on “Macbeth” instead, but also the throes of disabling back and leg pain. Throes that involve not just the pain itself but its treatment—the surgeries and the drugs, the physical and psychiatric therapies which too often blame, shame and otherwise disable the mind and body of the patient (or, more properly, the victim) in the current world of medicine. Anyone with a condition not highly visible or immediately amenable to treatment knows this world all too well. But the cocktail Awad’s genius makes of it (add Shakespeare, a sexy set designer, three mysterious strangers, and stir) is at once ironic enough to elicit serial paroxysms of laughter and lethal enough to create empathetic spasms of horror. Like the play itself, which is, as our professor reminds us, both a comedy and a tragedy, All’s Well plumbs the depths of illness and pain, their impact on the human spirit, as well as stirring our sense of irony. But Awad throws in elements of “Macbeth” as well, not to mention mind-altering psychotropic elements that turn the tale into a witches’ brew of diabolical payback as Miranda, helpless no more, meets head on the threat of a student revolt, a satanic therapist or two and the response of “friends” to chronic illness. Anyone paying attention to this blistering novel will think twice before labeling a colleague’s or loved one’s pain dismissively. And no one who’s read it will forget its long-suffering yet, in the end, formidable hero.