Fast-paced, funny, tragic, and terrifyingly true-to-life, "Bellevue" is a darkly comic novel about interns coming of age in the chaotic hell of a big-city hospital. It is an astonishing tour de force, a kind of medical "Catch-22". In the city's vast, disintegrating Bellevue Hospital, young Dr. David Levy hopes to avoid being molded into the same kind of doctor as his supervisor, Fat Goldman-- the symbol of all that is insane and uncaring about the medical establishment. Nor does Levy want to become like his best friend, the rebellious Sal Vertino. Although Sal was a star in medical school, his career may not survive his own doubts-- or his besotted pursuit of third-year student Delia Meducci, a smoldering beauty as ambitious and unscrupulous as she is sexy. Through Levy's exhausted eyes, we experience the hellish pressure of urban medicine-- where interns test their vocation by means of extended sleepless shifts, and where denying one's own feelings and humanity is the only way to survive. With hallucinatory scenes and sharply comic dialogue, "Bellevue" introduces a terrific cast of wild characters, including Rulo, an odd, wheelchair-roaming patient/philosopher; Larcombe, who is afflicted with every malady known to medicine; and Mrs. Ryan, who is mysteriously resuscitated-- though nobody knows why. A portrait of a hospital as Dante's "Inferno", "Bellevue" is at once funny and moving, a novel of life, love, death, passion, and-- rarest of all-- genuine originality.
- ISBN10 0684836025
- ISBN13 9780684836027
- Publish Date 1 April 1998
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 November 2014
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Simon & Schuster
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 287
- Language English