Books: Loving Care

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Next to a boy and his dog or a girl and her horse, no fictional setup is quite as durable--and automatically touching if done well--as the story of a sick man and his nurse. Now, to A Farewell to Arms and The English Patient, add another memorable star-crossed Red Cross romance: Thomas Moran's second novel, The World I Made for Her (Riverhead; 273 pages; $23.95), which delves into the bond between James Blatchley, a semicomatose New York City cop, and Nuala Riordan, his Irish-immigrant caregiver. Struck down (as the author himself was once) by a horrifically stubborn strain of chicken pox, the immobilized Blatchley has been rendered tongue-tied not by Cyrano-like shyness but by an emergency tracheotomy and an ominous respirator that he has nicknamed, Ken Kesey style, the Machine.

Given the story's medical ground rules, tragic, unrequited love is the only love Blatchley can reasonably hope for, and he makes the most of it, courting the plain but gentle Nuala solely from his neck up, in thoughts and dreams and the occasional rounding of his lips. Drifting among blackouts, hallucinations and long days of morphine-muted delirium, he stitches together a history for Nuala as an archetypal carefree country girl, all windblown red hair and stylized pink cheeks. But since Blatchley is also an intellectual (his police beat was forged and stolen art), he isn't satisfied with his first-draft images. As he revises and colors them in, he achieves a union with Nuala that, against all odds, isn't totally one-sided. The result is a reading experience as fresh and basic as lying down feverish on cool, clean linens with loving hands to tuck you in.

--By Walter Kirn