Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Through the whole drive back I kept trying to steal glances at Sils to see if she looked any different. She had now gone through so many things that I hadn't, I wondered more than ever whether she could still like me, be the same as she had been, or even remember things we'd done together. Was there a ghost, an amphibious baby ghost, flying out behind us, above us, all the way home like a kite? Under Sils's arms there were dark circles of perspiration on my green shirt. her hair had grown oily and the front had separated into strands. I leaned over to loosen the buckle of my sandals, and when I turned to look up at her, from that angle, I could see a small, golden bugger floating in the dark of her right nostril like a star--odd and alone, speaking dizzily without words.

Berie Carr is sitting at a cafe in Paris eating brains with her husband. Their marriage may be at an end--he's stupid but also too clever, and boring, and on top of all that he has just recently pushed her down the stairs--and facing the watershed of that failure she begins to think back on her childhood. Growing up in the small Adirondack mountain town of Horsehearts, New York (what a name!), her life was organized around her best friend Silsby, called Sils, a luminous presence that still shines in her memory. She thinks back through the story of how she and Sils once worked together at a chintzy amusement park called Storyland--Berie as a ticket-taker, Sils as Cinderella--when Sils became pregnant by her boyfriend, a motorcycle-riding meathead. Berie, enamored with her friend without the words or judgment to explain it to herself, promises that she will take care of Sils' predicament, and begins skimming money from the park cash box to pay for Sils' abortion.

I really loved the richness and humor of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?. It reminded me of Kathryn Davis' Labrador, another novel about one young girl enamored with another, and which shares some of the same luxury of detail and sparkle of prose. But in Labrador, the narrator's obsession with her sister is rewarded with cruelty and belittlement; Sils is beautiful and kind, even as the experience widens the gulf between her and the yet-to-bloom Berie.

I never quite felt the way Berie does about Sils as a character--she's too distant--but I believed wholeheartedly in Berie's belief, which strikes at something sad and true about the fleetingness of childhood love. With a few notable exceptions, like Sils' abortion and her boyfriend's motorcycle accident--which both he and she come to associate with the abortion itself, as a kind of manifested guilt--Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? avoids high drama. There's no big break between Sils and Berie, no shouting or tears or grand pronouncement, but Lorrie Moore plumbs the great depths of the small moments that life is often truly made of.

Memory, Moore writes, "can do nothing: It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew." Berie's trip down memory lane stands in stark contrast with her present marriage: though let down by the dissolution of her marriage, nothing can stand next to the slow fade of her relationship with Sils; the marriage simply never reached the same heights. Can any marriage, entered to as adults, really match the ardor of your first crushes? I thought that Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? captured this truth, as much about adulthood as it is about youth, quite beautifully.