Nightwork: With Uncle Wiggily

Nightwork is a direct, unflinching look at a region few, even those who make it their workplace, ever experience. This is long-term-care, a typical warehouse for the profoundly disabled. The two protagonists, Barry Stedman and Tommy King, are lovers. We have Stedman’s eight-hour shift and King’s year of employment on a similar ward. Most of all, however, there are the patients themselves, their terrors and triumphs—the bed-ridden, the senile, the incontinent, the aphasic, the crippled, the psychotic, the confused—a darkness that is often overwhelming. Uncle Wiggily , neither the famous children’s game nor, especially, the work of Howard Garis, though it riffs on both, is the story of a middle-aged fuddy-duddy who imprisons a spunky seven-year-old in a sound-proof room as a source of companionship and relief from caring for his crippled, incontinent mother. It is a tale of innocence gone awry and a “Lolita” for the 21st Century. In our diminished aesthetic world of the “good read,” these two highly humorous yet wrenching novels are testimony to the “difficult beauty” that can still survive in honest works of art.