Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart
Mimi Swartz
Biography, engineering
Having read a book on heart surgery recently, and another on heart symbolism, it seemed only natural to continue with heart engineering.
The subtitle is a bit of bait-and-switch. Ticker doesn't recount "the" quest to create an artificial heart. It recounts "a" quest, specifically the quest of one Dr. Oscar “Bud” Frazier of the Texas Heart Institute. Everyone else who's worked on artificial hearts is involved only in so far as they intersect Frazier's orbit.
The technique is reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, as exemplified in his classic The Soul of a New Machine. Mimi Swartz is no Tracy Kidder. To be fair, most people aren't. Swartz is a pretty good journalist and she writes pretty good "New Journalism" style prose. Ticker reads like a long article in one of the better class of magazines--Atlantic or New Yorker, perhaps--that's overflowed its banks. It suffers from a bad case of hagriography. It benefits from a narrow focus. It's strong in character portraits, particularly in a devastatingly acerbic view of pioneering heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. It's weak in technology.
Most unsatisfying, however, is that Ticker lacks an ending. I understand that Swartz wanted to get the book out, but the story she tells is an unfinished one. Reality is not neat. Great authors find a way to write as if it were; competent authors merely reflect the fact. Ticker is competent.
That's the trouble with fly-on-the-wall books. Some years ago I read a could-have-been-better book called The Battery, which was all about the drive to create a better battery, specifically one with an anode that can withstand the thousands of charge-ups and charge-downs necessary for powering a car engine; and for a hook it used the story of a few ingenious materials-science engineers at a daring startup. The problem was that the engineers were actually more overconfident than ingenious, and the results from a Korean research lab they were relying on turned out to be faked, and in light of it all the lead engineer's I-don't-suffer-fools attitude is revealed as unfounded arrogance. But the author was on deadline, and the book had to come out anyway, so instead of rewriting the first nine-tenths of the book as a lead-up to a story about human failures in engineering projects (which would still interestingly illustrate the challenges of battery design), he left the whole book as a lead-up to a heroic denouement that never arrived, just adding a final chapter that basically said "Anyway they were all wrong and none of it worked, so that's a thing that happened. Bye!"
ReplyDeleteYeah, my guess is that something similar happened here. Also, Mimi Swartz gets a little swoony over her main character, and by extension has her knives out for DeBakey (who, to be fair, was evidently a grade-A jerk).
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