FICTION

Kirsten Menger-Anderson's strikingly original "Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain" explores so many fascinating topics -- among them, animal magnetism, phrenology and spontaneous combustion -- that it might be best to begin with what it is not.

Although it follows several generations of a single family from 1664 to 2006, Menger-Anderson's book is not a doorstop-sized epic. It leaps across the centuries in a mere 290 pages.

Nor is it a novel, precisely. Menger-Anderson has built her book out of 13 freestanding stories, most of which feature a doctor from the esteemed, if cursed, Steenwycks lineage.

Yes, cursed.

As the book opens, neighbors have found Dr. Olaf van Schuler, father of the book's first Steenwycks, studying the partially dissected brain of a patient who had died under his care. Facing recrimination (the Catholic church looked down on such things in 1664), the good doctor hastily lights out for the New World with his lunatic mother in tow.

Freshly settled in New Amsterdam, Menger-Anderson writes, Doc Olaf secretly indulges "his peculiar perversion: slicing heads."

His goal is noble. As his secret dissections have shown, "The soul lived in the head, not in the heart, and bodily sickness could prevent its flow. Violence, anger, madness -- all were symptoms of the soul's mortal conduit. All were conditions he could remedy, as soon as he learned how."

Superstition and the era's limited medical knowledge hobble his studies, though. His descendents find themselves similarly vexed.

Jan Steenwycks, whom we meet in 1741, believes he alone "could determine if a man were truly dead," Menger-Anderson writes. She adds: "These days, no gentleman or lady was buried without a visit from Doctor Steenwycks."

But the case we see him undertake -- that of a boy whose death his mother refuses to accept -- grimly undermines his claim to possess what amount to magical powers. "There have been cases . . . documented cases of the dead reviving," he tells the boy's mother. This is not one of them.

Likewise, Dr. Abraham Steenwycks' attempt to cure his mentally ill sister in 1910 with a technique rather ominously called "the Swiss cure for violence" turns out badly, as does Dr. Theodorus Steenwycks' brain surgery in 1765 on an insane man, despite his promises.

After the surgery, Theodorus assures the man's mother, "He may -- well, suffice it to say that he will be able to secure employment. And with the passage of time, he may one day become an intellectual."

Ironically, each generation of Steenwycks believes it has improved on the previous one's work. In 1741, Jan dismisses his father's work as "[w]itchery nonsense."

And in 1910, Abraham reassures his sister, "Their father was a man of a past generation, and the new generation had progressed far beyond the old one's quaint ambitions."

Near the beginning of Menger-Anderson's strange and often spellbinding book, a schoolmaster wisely tells Olaf, "Men can only do so much." But try getting those crazy Steenwycks to listen.
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.