A small hourglass stands next to the computer on Dr. Iwan James’s office desk. No symbolism is intended — the device is actually a cheap 10-minute egg timer, exactly the length of a routine appointment in Dr. James’s general practice in a small Welsh town. It was donated by an annoyed patient specifically to embarrass the doctor.
Dr. James has a habit of fiddling with that hourglass, though, or flipping it repeatedly during a prolonged conversation with a patient. Inevitably, it becomes a subtle reminder of life’s brevity despite all the small triumphs and failures in that room.
That egg timer would be a difficult detail for any writer short of Chekhov to pull off. So would many of the other images in “The Bad Doctor,” Dr. Ian Williams’s roman à clef, like the giant black sunglasses worn by a menacing patient in which the doctor sees only a reflection of his own inadequate self, or the many flashbacks to the doctor’s troubled past, or even the doctor himself, a pallid, almost transparent individual who seems at ease only when he is compulsively biking the Welsh hills.
[For more of this story, written by Abigail Zuger, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06...-manifesto.html?_r=0]
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