The Call

Starred review from April 18, 2011
A triumph of quiet humor and understated beauty, Murphy's latest (after Signed, Mata Hari) takes the form of a diary belonging to veterinarian David Appleton, who recounts a year of converging perils: the slow grind of the recession, his worrying medical test results, a strange recurring vision, and the unwanted attention of a mysterious stranger. Then, when David's 12-year-old son, Sam, is shot in a hunting accident and winds up comatose, his family has every claim to despair; instead, they battle through, even as David's search for his son's shooter goes nowhere, and the stranger reveals a shocking, potentially life-altering secret. The trials of David's family are interposed with the calls he takes in his veterinary practice, in which he tends to sick sheep and injured horses with the same gentleness he shows his young children and exasperated but loving wife. These scenes evoke the dulcet cadences of life in a rural New England town, a place of stoicism and goodwill without the embroidery of folksy clichés. Murphy's subtle, wry wit and an appealing sense for the surreal leaven moments of anger and bleakness, and elevate moments of kindness, whimsy, and grace.

August 1, 2011

As Murphy's sixth book for adults (Signed, Mata Hari, 2007, etc.) gets started, a large-animal veterinarian in rural New England faces various small uncertainties: an iffy economy, weird recurrent lights in the night sky, a marriage in which there are minor flare-ups.

He has unspecified medical issues, too; his "levels" are volatile and worrying, and he resists going to the doctor. Murphy tells the tale mostly through the vet's reports—alternately no-nonsense and taciturn ("Call," "Action," "Result") or expansive and playful ("Who Walked Into the Hospital Room While I Was Moving My Hand Like the Spaceship")—of the calls he receives from animal owners, and the innovative form is perfectly suited to the doctor's voice: calm, cheerful, attentive, reliable, but also naggingly worried and prone to withhold or diminish the sources of his anxieties. One may be tempted at first to see him as a worrywart whose sense of foreboding is exaggerated, maybe an effect of the gathering chill of fall, which augurs another long, cold, mostly idle winter. Then, while he's hunting on his property with his 12-year-old son, the boy is accidentally shot in the shoulder and topples from a stand, lands on his head and lapses into a coma. The vet and his family try gamely to hold things together, but the strain is awful, and everyone in the small community seems to him a suspect. But is this a mystery worth pursuing, or merely a distraction from his real duty? He's never quite sure. Eventually a familiar-looking stranger—whom the vet takes to calling "the spaceman"—arrives in a whirring electric car and asks a favor that will have enormous implications for the entire family. Murphy is a subtle, psychologically perceptive writer, and the book has a wry humor that's laconic and surreal and shot through with the tender mysteries of family life.

A marvelous book: sweet and poignant without ever succumbing to easy sentiment, formally inventive and dexterous without ever seeming showy. A triumph. 

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2011

When a veterinarian in rural New England takes his son hunting, the boy is shot by another hunter and falls into a coma. Murphy (In a Bear's Eye) begins this startling story as a clever exercise in narration, with each entry concerning calls the vet receives and his responses and observations. A sample entry: "Thoughts on Drive Home: I know some people who will not look me in the eye." The entries get even stranger with the boy's hospitalization. The father sees UFOs and spacemen at night, and his unraveling continues as he attempts to find the shooter. VERDICT Murphy's eye for small-town detail and human/animal relations makes for a complex, delicate story line, and the novel as a whole carries a very real human velocity and gravity. The domestic focus and unexpected intrusions recall fiction by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. Engaging and acutely modern, this work will appeal to many readers.--Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2011
Whiting Award winner Murphy is both incisive and imaginative, pirouetting from the richly interpretive Signed, Mata Hari (2007) to this hypnotically patterned, wryly funny, and warmly compassionate tale of a New England veterinarian under duress. David's narration takes the form of a doctor's log. Under Call, he notes his phone conversations with clients; under Action, he reports on his visits to barns, fields, and homes to treat horses, cows, goats, and a pet sheep. But David is most concerned with humans as he tries to figure out who shot his son, Sam, now in a coma, while they were deer hunting. Add to that a hovering spacecraft, his own health worries, marital stress, and disconcerting phone calls from an anonymous, silent caller. Like Jen, David's beleaguered, thorny, and ironic wife, Murphy lives in Vermont with her veterinarian husband, three children, and two Newfoundland dogs, hence the visceral detail and deep knowledge that stoke this gorgeously realized novel of a good man's struggle with anger, fear, and duty. With phenomenal economy and delicious deadpan humor, Murphy dramatizes small-town contrariness, the fearful beauty and power of nature, the preciousness of ordinary family routines, and the many forms of giving and healing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)