I Can’t Save You: A Memoir

In this scattered debut, surgeon Chin-Quee catalogs his tumultuous path to becoming a doctor. Growing up in Brooklyn as an only child of West Indian immigrants, Chin-Quee was encouraged to pursue a steady career path from an early age. After medical school, he began his residency at a Detroit hospital, and he relays the mental and physical tolls of that experience in harrowing anecdotes about his first patient death, a night out with coworkers that ended with Chin-Quee jumping into a broken elevator to rescue a passed-out friend, and his fraught relationship with Waldo, a younger resident he struggled to mentor. Throughout the residency, Chin-Quee was seized by fears that his career and personal relationships would fall apart, and he attempts to capture that instability with a series of stylistic flourishes, including poems, a potential suicide note, and a screenplay that documents racial microaggressions he’s endured. Though they’re inventive, many of these exercises fall flat, neither entertaining nor affecting enough to make an impression. Some late passages about Chin-Quee’s father are moving and illuminating, however. It’s a valiant effort, but it doesn’t stand out on the crowded shelf of medical memoirs. Agent: Jon Michael Darga, Aevitas Creative Management. (Apr.)