Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? makes me want to sing in a choir and skip service at the same time. a novel written from the perspective of a 40-something woman recounting her last summer as the best friend of an underage demigoddess, Lorrie Moore weaves bittersweet nostalgia with the present. (there is no there there.) berrie carr eats parisian brains in an attempt to taste something familiar, she catches up with her rich french-american friend living off french welfare who reminds her of sils, she loves her husband who pushed her down a flight of stairs and who asks her which "aggrandizement" they are in paris. berrie and sils are like the yin and yang, an amusement park cashier wearing a pinafore to match cinderella's cigarette stained polyester gown. berries lives with her family of strangers, one desolate foster sister, and sils lives with her mom who works at a motel and her brothers who make music in the basement. they eat salads for breakfast and drink beers at night. they meet at a five-year-old's headstone to smoke cigarettes and wait for sils to say something more. they run away from a man who waves a gun over their naked bodies led in the middle of a dark field. men ask sils to dance, and berrie stares and thinks they wonder where sils came from. men ask berrie to dance, and sils tilts her head back as her boyfriend nuzzles his mouth into her neck. berrie steals money from the register, sils gets pregnant, and they drive to Vermont with a dwarf cabbie. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? begins with a drawing of a picture of two little girls, and ends with lorrie moore's verbal transference of the transcendence of a Girls Choir "the careful harmonies set loose from our voices so pure and exact and light we wondered later, packing up to leave, how high and fast and far they had gone." (148)some dog-eared QUOTES: It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe. (8)We looked to secret things. We looked to stories and misadventures and mined them for their narcotic ore. We loved to laugh violently, convulsively, no sound actually coming out until suddenly we'd have to gasp in a braying way for breath. (15) And in this lie I feel close to him, so grateful to him, so full of pity. (48)... and we burst out laughing, in a stoned, mean way, but he laughed with us, and we all just sat there in the night traffic laughing in the uncontrolled, hysterical way of people who rarely got what they wanted in life though they also didn't try very hard. (59)"You know those cream puffs called Divorce?" (79)
In many ways, this is your standard issue depressing young-girl-coming-of-age story:Beautiful butterfly pinned to the corkboard of life--check!The Awkward One--check!Languorous, sticky summer days--check! Teenage trauma--check! A turning point whence the protagonists shall never return--check!A narrator surveying her adolescent landscape many years removed and concluding that she shall never, ever experience such a poignant time of life again, as her marriage crumbles into dissolution (that last part I might be making up, but go with me here)--check! Allison tearing up at the end in an inappropriate locale--G.D. it, check! While all of this might have been obnoxiously formulaic in lesser hands, and while I am tired of reading books that make me pine for the bleach and really must stop, I mean, just STOP IT already, this book has some truly beautiful moments, and some of the zingers in here, well, they really Zing. That said, I'll take Thelma and Louise, or Romy and Michelle, over these sad sacks any day. Also, I didn't get all the insistence toward the end regarding Sils' "niceness"--that really isn't what her characterization up to that point would lead us to believe.
What do You think about Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? (2004)?
“My life like an old turnip: several places at once going bad.”Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is a look back at what the publishing industry euphemistically calls “young adulthood” by a writer who, during her own years on the young side of adulthood, preferred to dwell on life’s inglorious middle. While Moore refrains from some of the snappier crutches of the genre, she does demonstrate a fantastic ear for the pithy truths of those looking upon the grown-up world for the first time as near-peers. “Once you had seen enough people go through your register you realized everyone was the same: they looked the same, said the same things; they were all the same.”Her main character, Berie, is a teenager working at an amusement park in her hometown in upstate New York. Berie unequivocally adores her friend Sils. Berie is a lowly cashier, while Sils’ good looks and confidence have earned her a coveted role as a princess hostess at the same amusement park.Suffice it to say, Berie and Sils’ friendship does not survive the summer, although there is no outright betrayal such as those that occur weekly on teen soaps. Instead, boys and money and life happen. Looking back, years later, from a lonely dinner in Paris with her husband, Berie sees in her friendship with Sils, despite its hiccups and small hurts, love in the purest form she’s ever known.The style is quietly autobiographical here when compared with the light farce of A Gate at the Stairs, and yet Berie’s voice is sharper than Tessie Keltjin’s. “Go placidly. What a crock.”As a result, Berie’s frustrations and impatience with the start and stop progress of young adulthood cut deeper, in the end, as well.
—Stephanie Sun
I remember a member of our book group recommending this book not long after it was first published...and I've always remembered the title. Great title!This was, for me, another book that didn't reach its full potential. Possibly because I found the grown woman a bit difficult to relate to, stuck in an unhappy marriage with no deep connections with any other human beings.As she looks back on her childhood friendship with Sils, I found it easier to relate to her. This book made me recollect my own very deep friendships with other girls, most of whom I am no longer in contact with. After being so close, our lives changed, they moved away, or we just grew apart. Part of me feels sadness about those friendships lost, but the other part of me realizes that the friends I have now are much better suited to the adult me. This book also forced me to remember stupid mistakes that I made in childhood. What prompts children or teenagers to do stupid things, knowing in the back of their mind that they might get caught?So it was not entirely unredeeming, but I was not particularly satisfied with the ending and found it depressing.
—Marie
yet another book that should be almost 4 star.. beautiful use of language and very evocative of growing up and teen age angst. The book leaves a lot unsaid. painting a broad picture of a family that appears to have no emotional connection or warmth and the impact on the main character. The main thread discusses the closeness between two teenage girls..a bond that seems so strong at the time yet is so fragile when confronted by thereality of growing up. Heard an interview with the author on pbs which brought me to this book and will certainly read others by this same writer.
—Jo-anne
