Doctor Bloom's Story

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This is a novel that different readers are likely to read and interpret
in different ways. For those primarily interested in plot, the story of
an intricate and shocking case of wife beating is absorbing and beckons
on to the denouement. For those requiring their literature to comment on
social problems, it offers the timely treatment of a newsworthy,
contemporary topic. (Both these groups may, however, find the going
somewhat tough.) But for the more intellectually inclined, its centre
lies elsewhere. Don Coles, it seems clear, is ultimately more
preoccupied with his narrator than with his plot.

Dr. Bloom, whose name conjures up echoes of both James Joyce and Ivan
Goncharov, is an established cardiologist now more interested in
literature than in medicine. Like his poet creator, he is formidably
well read in the major works of European culture, and much of the action
takes place in a seminar on creative writing, which he attends
regularly. While he becomes obsessed with the likelihood that a fellow
student is the victim of severe physical abuse, he is equally obsessed
with the challenge of writing and with the ways in which the creative
arts both reflect and illuminate our lives. The focus is not so much on
the violent actions that uphold the plot as on those who find themselves
(like Bloom) on the edges of violence, and especially on Bloom’s
thought processes while finding himself enmeshed in the lives and
problems of others.

Not an easy novel to pin down, Doctor Bloom’s Story is about the
creative process but also (since the victim of violence is a follower of
St. Theresa and Simone Weil) about spiritual issues that are generally
ignored by medical science but to which Bloom is inexorably (if not
providentially) drawn.

Bloom tells the story in a seemingly casual but pointed
stream-of-consciousness style that will remind admirers of Coles’s
poetry of his characteristic “way with words” in verse. A serious
and intriguing novel, then, particularly rewarding for connoisseurs of
fiction.