More Than It Hurts You

Coming June 19
Dutton Books
ISBN: 9780525950707



The third novel from the author of Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy is an often satiric page-turner that tracks a Long Island family crisis. Josh Goldin is a happily married TV airtime salesman with an eight-month-old son. When baby Zack is treated twice for mysterious and life-threatening symptoms, the head of a pediatric ICU, Dr. Darlene Stokes, tells Child Protective Services that she thinks Josh's wife, Dori, suffers from Munchausen syndrome, whereby the afflicted injure their children deliberately to draw attention to themselves. The Goldins' ensuing battle to keep Zack provides grist for public debate about issues ranging from parents' rights to race (Dr. Stokes is black, the Goldins Jewish). Strauss takes delight in skewering a world in which everything (news coverage, legal representation, hospital beds) is for sale, sometimes digressively, always amusingly. The stereotypes are intentionally heavy-handed: Josh's perceptions almost always register through race and class-related fear and disgust. But the heart of the story—the unraveling of Josh's life and the steady erosion of his faith that ignorance can be a virtue and happiness a choice—is riveting.

Reviews



Listen to Gary Oldman
reading an excerpt from
More Than It Hurts You

Click open the panel below


 



More Than It Hurts You : an excerpt
 
Gary Oldman reads

an excerpt from
More Than It Hurts You
by
Darin Strauss


 
 
;
 

The question for Josh had always been: how much blindness does a happy life require? Josh had grown up watching the Mr. Magoo show, in which a wealthy man took on the difficulty of failed eyesight by sallying into the world as if everything were fine: he walked off the edge of a girder (the hardhats pointing, yelling, panicking). But right as he stepped into space, some crane swung an I-beam up under his shoes. Or he would saunter into an animal pen, mistaking it for a doctor’s office, and caress a tiger in the belief that he was petting a kitten—and the jungle beast would purr and nuzzle. If Josh could just mosey through his days like Magoo through a room, narrowly avoiding the furniture of human faults, wasn’t there a chance the world might be flattered, and agree with him, and transform itself into a series of blessings? But if that worked, it led to another question, one he hadn’t thought about before: What sort of life did that become?

However.

A greater sin than emotional blindness is to play at love without purpose, to be caught just visiting the highpoints of your own existence. Josh loved Dori honestly—faithfully and blindly. And that was the reason he failed to avoid this strange shipwreck of his family life.

 

The police had arrived at 7:30am on a Monday. Josh’d had his dress shirt open, a tie flapping, unknotted, like a scarf. (Coffee made Josh sweat through his shirt.) His doorbell rang; the baby started to clap and laugh. Josh said, “Shh—hey, cool it, buddy,” which in hindsight felt the most excruciatingly mean thing he’d ever say to anyone. In the doorway stood a policeman with a mid-career softness at his middle. What can you do when a cop gets in your face with his arrogant nose? What can a father do when the police have legal authority to kidnap his son?