Confessions of a Medical Student

Set in the troubled '60s of Vietnam, civil rights, drugs, and Middle East tensions, Confessions charts 20-year-old Ben Adler’s tragic-comic journey from home to med-school and the world beyond.

Callow and impressionable, Ben leaves his over-anxious Russian-Jewish parents in their Toronto drugstore, and Angie, his girlfriend whom he plans to marry against parents’ wishes. In anatomy, Ben dissects his cadaver, "Clive," with lab-mates—Franco Basso, Lisa Berg, and Ryan Callaghan. Ben fast becomes Callaghan’s best buddy, only to fall hopelessly in love with Ryan’s hot-blooded Trinidadian girl-friend, Natasha. Unsure of med-school, and caught in love’s web with Angie and Natasha, Ben wrestles with identity, med-school and Lenny Moscow, a passionate American campus activist who argues for Free Speech, Free Love, and Anarchy.

As the first blush of med-school fades, Ben learns of his father’s life-threatening illness. Cash-poor, Ben enlists in the Navy to earn room and board, joins Lenny’s Underground Railroad for draft-dodgers, jeopardizing studies and provoking his ill father’s scorn. Darker events descend—Ben’s ill father grows more depressed and unable to work; his parents list their home for sale; a revered uncle dies, his son, Ziggie, Ben’s cousin, a drug-addict, suffers a breakdown; and Ben’s lovers, Angie and Natasha, repudiate his love. The reader follows Confessions chronicling the tumultuous years 1966-1971 through the eyes of a naive, sentimental student striving to move beyond family, self, and place. Ben careens from mistake to mistake over four years, yet at the novel’s end he emerges with self-knowledge and a touch of worldly pain and wisdom.