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The Good Doctor The Good Doctor Damon Galgut Grove/Atlantic, 2003 215 pp. $23

When we meet Frank, a white South African doctor, apartheid has ended. Frank inhabits a dilapidated hospital in a forgotten former homeland—"homelands" being sham black African nations that the apartheid regime drew up to sustain its fiction of separate-but-equal racial development. Now those homelands, and the mock ideals behind them, are gone. In Frank's hospital, built on a grand scale to foster the illusion of significance, few patients come and little medical care is offered. The town and the region seem vacant and exhausted. So does Frank. He is used up, alienated from his family (his wife has left him for his best friend), and without noticeable hope or affection for his work or his country. He seems unprejudiced only because he does not like or trust a single soul on earth, black or white.

Then Laurence arrives, an idealistic young doctor just out of medical school. Laurence is "the good doctor," determined to help the poorest and most neglected of people. Almost immediately Laurence runs smack into the lethargy and indifference that have taken over the hospital like a poison gas. It dismays and unmans him, but he refuses to bow to the inevitable—at least, to what Frank considers the inevitable.

Frank tells Laurence that he has made a mistake in choosing the hospital. "But people get injured, people get sick," Laurence answers. "Don't they need help?" Frank's response is scornful:

"What do you think this place means to them? It's where the army came from. It's where their puppet dictator lived. They hate this place."

"You mean politics," he [Laurence] said. "But that's all past now. It doesn't matter any more."

"The past has only just happened. It's not past yet."

"I don't care about that. I'm a doctor."

Thus Laurence embodies idealism and hope, but in a brittle, blind form. He has no human touch, no real empathy. His ideals are all in his head.

Frank, for his part, has made a temporary peace with the dead present. "The past and the future are dangerous countries; I had been living in no man's land, between their borders, for the last seven years." Though Laurence takes an unaccountable liking to him, Frank finds Laurence's morality irritating. "So simple," he thinks when they argue whether to report a black nurse for stealing:

One issue, all the complexities and contradictions reduced to a single moral needle-point. And that was Laurence. Something was either good or bad, clearly and definingly so, and you acted accordingly.

"I don't think it's that easy," I said with sad satisfaction.

That "sad satisfaction" is precisely meant. Frank is satisfied with his sadness.

For his part, Laurence believes fervently in the "new country" where ideals and hope promise everything. Against all odds he launches traveling clinics, which raise everyone's spirits and promise to rejuvenate the hospital's mission. For a brief time, we think his dreams might come true.

Frank can't stand Laurence's idealism, and avoids his clinics. Laurence wants to know Frank's "grand defining moment" when he decided to become a doctor. What Frank remembers is a moment in the army when he let himself be used to justify torture. He doesn't want to know this about himself. He doesn't want to think how depressed and hopeless he has become. Laurence and his ideals make it impossible for him to feel content in the same old place.

Part of him gropes for a meaningful life, a way into the future. A series of assignations with Maria, a black curio seller, teeters between prostitution and love. Sometimes Frank questions her, trying to learn about her life. Other times they barely touch while having sex, exchanging only money.

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