A BED BY THE WINDOW
A Novel of Mystery and Redemption
M. Scott Peck
Bantam Books
306 pp., $18.95
“That's one of the troubles with people,” Georgia continued… “They think of us patients in a nursing home as people who are already dead. They don't think of us as having real lives. They don't even think of us as being capable committing murder.”
Lieutenant Petri sat back thoughtfully. He had gotten used to the fact that when he had come into Willow Glen [nursing home] he had wandered into a territory quite foreign to him. Now it was also beginning to dawn on him that he had wandered into it with a lot of preconceptions.
Readers of A Bed by the Window may feel much the same way. Not only does the novel take us into the unusual setting of a nursing home, a place we may dread even to think on, it also upsets our own preconceptions about far more than the world of the old and infirm. On a surface level, the novel is a mystery, and an exciting one at that, centering on the murder of a hideously deformed and completely paralyzed genius, Stephen Solaris, a man gifted with insight into the hearts of those who come in contact with him. The nursing home setting, however, is but the stage for the exploration of more profound and complex mysteries than the identity of the killer. It is a place where death is always close; and the proximity of death, as Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, can concentrate the mind. Or, as Willow Glen's chief administrator Edith Simonton, tells the detective, “Things tend to become a bit more focused when you're close to death.” The nearness of death raises for both characters and the reader ultimate questions about good and evil and about the meaning and value of life. These mysteries are the novel's real subject.
Religion, psychology, and ultimate concerns
Historically it has been the function of religions to frame a worldview that offers a sense of ultimate meaning in the face of chaotic events such as unmerited suffering and, of course, death. But as traditional religions, particularly Christianity, exert less influence over the minds of educated Westerners, the reality of death raises the haunting specter of meaninglessness. In response, our society to an unusual degree ignores death. In Western Attitudes Toward Death French historian Philippe Aries describes what he terms a “brutal revolution” in contemporary attitudes toward death, a change in which “death, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar …would become shameful and forbidden.” Although we may intellectually admit the reality of death, “at heart we feel we are nonmortals.” No wonder the successful accountant who is returning his mother to Willow Glen at the book's opening cannot wait to escape the place, remarking to his wife as they leave, “But if this is what it means to get old, I'd just as soon you put me out of my misery.” Even the best of such places takes its toll on the illusion of immortality and calls into question the worth of a life built around the accumulation of creature comforts.
When religion no longer provides meaning and the terror of death can no longer be ignored, there is always psychology to attempt to fill the void.
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