Inferno, by Alan Cohen, is an ambitious piece of literary fiction that follows Nancey Reese, a young nurse in 1980s Holyoke, as she stumbles from innocence into something like self-awareness, all while a chatty, self-conscious narrator and his “Doctor” creator keep stepping in to talk about genes, consciousness, and what stories are for. We move between Nancey’s cramped apartment and chaotic hospital shifts, her friendships and near-relationships, and long reflective chapters on genetics and the mind that frame her life as one experiment among many. By the end, Nancey is left standing in an open future rather than wrapped up neatly, the “inferno” of experience still burning but no longer completely opaque.

On one level, there is this very grounded, almost stubbornly ordinary story of a plain young woman who smokes too much, works nights, and learns how to pay rent, navigate a toxic head nurse, cling to a glamorous friend like Susan, and decide what kind of intimacy she can stand. Those scenes feel relatable and authentic. On the other level, the narrator piques interest with intriguing ideas, talking about DNA as “snakes” inside us and consciousness as a new “light” that lets us see our own thoughts. Instead of feeling like a gimmick, it worked for me as a kind of echo chamber. Nancey’s small choices and the essayistic chapters keep reflecting each other, so her drifting, timid, half-woken life sits next to these big questions about how much freedom any of us really have.

What surprised me most was how much the book leans into self-awareness. The narrator reminds readers that he is a construct, trying to tell Nancey’s story under the Doctor’s rules. Then the Doctor himself appears as a character. It sounds clever, but I read it as someone worrying, out loud, about responsibility: to a character, to real patients, to family, to a life you could have lived but didn’t. There were times when the philosophical chapters stretched on, and I wanted to get back to Nancey and Susan or the drama at Mercy Hospital. But even there, I felt the pull of the ideas. The book keeps asking, in different ways, whether we are more than our genes, our conditioning, our old stories. It is curious, sometimes grand, and then suddenly very tender, like when the narrator pauses to wonder what kind of future Nancey should be allowed to have and admits he is still just curious, still compassionate, still vigorous, and cannot walk away from her fate.

By the time I reached the end, with Nancey facing the consequences of her choices and then offered back to the reader as a full-length portrait rather than a closed case, I felt oddly protective of her. It did not feel like a neat moral tale. It felt more like watching someone you know muddle through their twenties in slow motion. The genre is literary fiction, with a strong philosophical streak and a taste for metafiction, so it asks for patience and attention instead of dishing out quick thrills. I would recommend Inferno to readers who enjoy long, idea-driven novels, who are happy to sit with a flawed, sometimes frustrating protagonist, and who like their stories spliced with essays on science and consciousness. If you like the thought of George Eliot arguing with Oliver Sacks inside a hospital drama, you are the right audience.

Pages: 624 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0FTRPQ7NQ