The Absurdities of Love Andrea Seigel's tale of medical woe owes a lot to the 19th century. BY SUZI STEFFEN TO FEEL STUFF, fiction by Andrea Seigel. Harcourt, 2006. Paperback, $14. Sure, To Feel Stuff is a clunky title, but maybe that's the point: after all, the preciousness of the novel's set-up demands a little clunk to balance out. Young novelist Andrea Seigel (sadly, posed in her author picture undressed, as if she just arose from a certain physical activity) provides three main characters in this mix of romance, 19th-century illness narrative and sort-of ghost story. The tale begins as a report entitled "E and Me" by Mark Kirschling, M.D., in The Journal of Parapsychology. Kirschling's story is essentially one of failure; he wants to become famous in his field for his research, but he seems likely to become a joke. The research he conducts takes place at Brown University, on a sophomore student named Elodie, who contracts any and every disease possible and lives in the infirmary. This Victorian-sounding place lies in an antiquated part of the Health Services building, a place so weird that students visiting their friends can't quite believe it exists on a modern campus. Apparently the infirmary doesn't contain things like cell phone chargers, and the bizarrely enclosed nature of the action makes the one reference to a laptop seem disingenuous. The students don't email; Elodie speaks in the form of a letter written on a pad of Paxil advertising paper. Seigel either should have peppered her story, set in 2003-2004, with iPods, texting and FaceBook or moved it to the early 1990s, before electronics completely altered communication. Chess, the recipient of Elodie's epistle, also presents himself in a letter, one written after his recovery and graduation. Chess and Elodie meet cute; he's singing in his a cappella group when he is attacked by a crowbar-wielding man, assumed to be a disgruntled Providence townie, and of course he winds up in the infirmary. Perhaps in the Ivy League, students who should be in the hospital or who should be able to get around on crutches, as Chess clearly can later in the story, pay extra for the privilege of hanging out on campus, getting their homework sent by courier, living a sort of parallel existence. At least, that's how Seigel presents life for Chess and Elodie in their own private recovery room. The three first-person narratives (for Dr. Kirschling's is less scholarly than one might expect) triangulate nicely so that Seigel can explain what's going on in each character's brain while providing a reflection from the others. The technique establishes a certain amount of narrator unreliability, but it also provides too obvious a scaffolding for cutesy authorial games involving foreshadowing and attribution of motives. The book is essentially a tale of Chess and Elodie, and by extension a tale about college relationships in general: their speed, their intensity, their sudden shifts and conclusions. The overlay of Kirschner's investigation and Elodie's medical issues adds interest to the tale. Kirschling ends as a figure both of ridicule and sympathy, while Chess fades into the blank state his personality, as expressed in the letter written on a memo pad that says "From the Desk of Chester Hunter III," foretells. And what's Elodie's deal? Is she psychic? Does she have some sort of auto-immune self-destruction? Is she crazy? The latter never really seems an option. Her narrative clearly demonstrates a debt to parapsychic theories about the disturbances of becoming an adult and how that relates to unexplained phenomena. Seigel's writing has the self-conscious cleverness of someone in an MFA program, but she does create a strong emotional impact from Elodie's absurd, lonely situation. To Feel Stuff explores the ways people learn about mortalitiy and, perhaps because of this knowledge, hide themselves from each other until the future becomes the present, and there's no more time to hide.    Andrea Seigel reads at 7:30pm Wednesday, Aug. 30, at Powell's on Burnside in Portland.
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