Chris Adrian, author of the 2001 novel Gob’s Grief, will speak at Boston College Dec. 3
A First Hand Look at One Man’s Grief
Chris Adrian, author of the 2001 novel Gob’s Grief, will speak at Boston College Dec. 3
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At 11 years old, Gob Woodhull suffers an unimaginable tragedy when his twin brother Tomo is killed shortly after running off to fight in the American Civil War. His sorrow is compounded by guilt: He had promised to go with Tomo but couldn’t bring himself to leave home. Gob grows up determined to somehow right this wrong, and hits upon the idea of creating a time machine that will bring Tomo and other Civil War dead back to life.Gob’s attempts to realize his obsession — and the consequences of his efforts — are at the core of Gob’s Grief, the 2001 novel by Chris Adrian, who will speak at Boston College Dec. 3.
Adrian’s talk will take place at 6 p.m. in Devlin 101 as part of the Lowell Lectures Humanities Series, and also is sponsored by the Institute for Liberal Arts in conjunction with the McMullen Museum of Art exhibition “First Hand: Civil War Drawings from the Becker Collection.”
A pediatrician who is studying at Harvard Divinity School, Adrian — whose other works include The Children’s Hospital — will discuss how the fields of medicine and theology have influenced his fiction. He also will touch on his impression of historical events play into the writing process. The major characters in Gob’s Grief include fictional as well as real-life figures like Walt Whitman, with unlikely or unusual connections: Gob and Tomo, for instance, are the fictional children of renowned suffragist and social activist Victoria Woodhull,
who also appears in the book.
Associate Professor of Fine Arts Sheila Gallagher, an organizer of the event, says Gob’s Grief dovetails neatly with the “First Hand” exhibition, the first-ever public display of Civil War-era drawings by Joseph Becker and other 19th-century artists who worked as artist-reporters for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
“Gob’s Grief, like ‘First Hand,’ does not attempt to tell the story of the American Civil War in a linear narrative, but reveals individual responses to immense loss and the confusion of a nation and a family reeling from death,” she explains. “All of the characters in the book, like the entire American nation, grieve and are forever changed by the suffering, but it is striking how in both Gob’s Grief and the Becker Collection the lyrical beauty of the images and the prose make it impossible not to appreciate the hopefulness of the young conflicted nation.
“In both Adrian’s novel and in images from the Becker Collection, historic figures are intermingled with ones that are imagined or composed. The reader/viewer experiences both the novel and the exhibition as a cumulative phenomenon where stories and images are layered one on top of another, the whole emerging from a collection of subjective visions and experiences. This is history, but this is art. I take from both the novel and the exhibition a reminder that history is made by all of these millions of individual experiences.”
Gallagher sees the time machine facet of Gob’s Grief as “a fantastic metaphor for art. The experience of the images from the Becker Collection is a kind of time travel. A visitor may learn about the Siege of Petersburg from examining the drawings, but they also will leave the exhibition knowing the artists who were there.
“As the great-granddaughter of Joseph Becker,” she adds, “I feel that the exhibition is like a machine that brings him back to life.”
For more on the “First Hand: Civil War Drawings from the Becker Collection” exhibition, see the McMullen Museum website at www.bc.edu/artmuseum.
Sean Smith can be reached at sean.smith.1@bc.edu