‘Sacrament’ review: Susan Straight pays tribute to COVID nurses

Throughout the spring and summer of 2020, millions of quarantined citizens in the United States and around the world appeared every night at their windows and balconies, expressing gratitude to the medical workers whose lives were dedicated to saving them. In my little corner of Silver Lake, the daily cacophonous community concert began at 7 p.m., with pots and pans clattering, trombones and trumpets blaring, dogs and coyotes howling: an appreciative group roar. I was 67 years old and had respiratory problems: very high risk. My younger neighbors, knowing this, bought groceries for me, sweetening my mornings with fresh milk and fruit during those long, dark days.

“The Sacrament” is Susan Strait's tribute to a small fictional group of intensive care unit nurses battling the 2020 COVID-19 surge at a San Bernardino hospital. Her 10th novel follows the rhythm she has covered and lived since her first. Aquaboogie, her 1990 debut, was set in Rio Seco, a fictional stand-in for Riverside, where Strait grew up and still lives. Streit, the first in her family to graduate from high school, earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts and brought it home to the University of California, Riverside, where she has taught creative writing since 1988. Her dual passion for her homeland and lyrical prowess blossom on every page. “There was less traffic on the roads in Southern California all summer, and everyone noted that in the absence of smog, the sunsets were not deep, bright crimson. Just a quiet slide into darkness.”

The Los Angeles Times called Straight “bard of forgotten California“, and “Sacrament” proves the praise. Strait's African-American ex-husband and three daughters, her Latino, Filipino, white, indigenous and mixed-race neighbors, and her immersion in forgotten California give new meaning to the advice to “write what you know.” Strait's personal and literary mission extends to WHO she knows.

In “The Sacrament,” Strait pays particular attention to a handful of nurses camped out in a train of brightly colored, stuffy trailers outside the hospital they call Our Lady. Separated from their spouses and children—”Six feet away or six feet underground,” chants Larette's son Joey—Larette, Cherrys, Marisol and their co-workers are themselves insufficiently protected from the virus they eventually contract, as well as from the domestic drama that seeps out of the house on the days they spend time in the pressure cooker. Fearing that her mom will die, Cherris' teenage daughter, Raquel, convinces Joey to take her to the hospital from the date farm where Raquel was placed in the care of her Aunt Lolo. The trip should take two hours, but the teenagers were missing for two nightmarish days. Having narrowly escaped a would-be kidnapper, Raquel remains haunted by her near fate. “The fingers in her hair were pulling so hard it felt like there were tiny bubbles under her skin. Wait until I really pull your hair out, bitch. She heard him even now.

Delving deeper than the everyday insults of her characters' loneliness, poverty, and fear, Straight takes us inside their tortured minds. Trying to take a nap, Larette lies down on a cot in the rec room with her eyes closed, but is unsuccessful. “Ghost fingers on her left palm. Her right hand holding a FaceTime phone for wives. Husbands. Grown children,” she writes. “All their faces. Stoic. Crying. Biting their lips so hard.” Later, Larette tells her husband, “Everyone you see on TV banging pots and pans, everyone having parades, it's so nice. But then I have to be alone with… their breathing. Their breathing just… it slows down, and it's scary every time.”

Perhaps most painful among nurses' many sufferings is their isolation: the secrets they keep in hopes of sparing their loved ones further suffering. None of us tell anyone we love anything, Larette thought. [her husband] everything will be true in a few weeks.”

As Strait's work consistently does, The Sacrament challenges the prevailing idea that the forgotten Californians she centers in her work and in her life are less worthy, less interesting, less human than their wealthier, whiter, more visible urban counterparts. Many affluent Americans, programmed to equate “rugged independence” with success, first appreciated human interdependence (the berries in our cereal, the test kits on our porches) during lockdown. In Straight's world, raising each other's children, feeding each other's elders, keeping each other's secrets, mourning the dead, and fighting hellishly for the living are not called necessities. This is called life.

“The Sacrament” expands the reader’s understanding of community beyond carnal friends, family, and neighbors. The love and care that flows within her characters' community draws the reader into their vibrant, close circle, making the characters' loved ones and problems feel like their own.

Spoiler alert: sacrifices, strengths and weaknesses of nurses; their families, deprived not only of mothers, wives and daughters, but also of every drop of security; and their patients, who have tubes inserted into their urethras and throats and blink their desperate final moments into iPads before their last breath, are likely to make the reader see, respect and love not only these characters, but the always brilliant author who gave them life on the page of this, her best book.

Maran, author of The New Old Me and other books, lives in a bungalow in Silver Lake that is even older than hers.