TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 6/23/97: Women With Men: Three Stories By Richard Ford Fiction 6/20/97: Resident Alien: The New York Diaries By Quentin Crisp Nonfiction 6/19/97: Cold Mountain By Charles Frazier Fiction 6/18/97: Feeding Frenzy By Stuart Stevens Fiction 6/17/97: Straight Man By Richard Russo Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: No more magic realism By Alberto Fuguet A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

patient: _the true story ______of a rare illness BY BEN WATT GROVE PRESS 178 PAGES NONFICTION BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK for anyone who's ever been hospitalized with a serious illness and experienced the way days lose their normal shapes to take on restless, amorphous new ones, the way nights stretch out forever like dim, endless airplane runways, "Patient," Ben Watt's incisive memoir, is likely to strike a chord. In early summer 1992, Watt, half of the English pop-music duo Everything But the Girl, was hospitalized after complaining of chest pains; he wasn't released until eight weeks later. During that time, he was fed through tubes, suffered through grueling rounds of poking and probing, underwent surgery in which 85 percent of his small intestine was removed, and ultimately lost more than 40 pounds. The diagnosis: a rare auto-immune disease known as Churg-Strauss Syndrome. "To paraphrase Joseph Heller," Watt writes, "'You know it's something serious when they name it after two guys.'" As compact and intense as a good pop song, "Patient" is a sharply observed record of Watt's illness, capturing perfectly the listlessness, and the relief of sinking into the routine of being cared for, that comes with the territory of being hospitalized for any length of time. "Like a lone diver among sharks, I would watch the cool-eyed doctors and anaesthetists glide round my bed. The doctors on ITU were strange, humorless, intent ... Patient survival was rooted in the minute analysis of charts and the balancing of chemicals, not so much in warmth of human contact, and so the doctors glided from flickering monitor to flickering monitor amid the sonars of bleeps and alarms, gauging, estimating, quiet, serious." Watt's story has the gravity, the drama, the shivery beauty of an underwater seascape: Moments of terror are balanced with moments of delight. And he doesn't simply retread the tired old turf of describing what it's like to be critically ill. He writes about his personal relationships (particularly with Tracey Thorn, his longtime partner and bandmate), his childhood and his recent past with astonishing humor and grace. "Patient" isn't a woe-is-me book, but a look at how a harrowing ordeal can shape you into something new, a person you never expected to be. When, at the end, Watt finally gets behind the wheel of the red Alfa Spyder he'd ordered before his illness struck, you can't blame him for wanting to floor the gas pedal. You get the feeling that settling for a quiet spin around the block would be the only thing that could kill him. June 24, 1997 Stephanie Zacharek lives in Boston. She is a regular contributor to Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html