THE MILLIONS article about Hibbing Minnesota authors: Bob Dylan (Chronicles), Vincent Bugliosi (Helter Skelter), Bethany McLean (The Smartest Guys in the Room), Rick Novak (The Doctor and Mr. Dylan)

February 1, 2024February 1, 2024THE ANESTHESIA CONSULTANT Leave a comment

A street sign in the childhood hometown of Bob Dylan, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, is seen in Hibbing, Minnesota

Marie Myung-OK Lee, a staff writer for The Millions, successful novelist, creative writing professor at Columbia University in New York, and fellow native of Hibbing, Minnesota, discusses the proliferation of writers from Bob Dylan’s hometown in this article “What is it About Hibbing?” on The Millions website. For a village of 17,000, Hibbing produced the writers Bob Dylan, Vincent Bugliosi, Marie Mug-OK Lee, Bethany McClean, Kathleen Novak, Patrick McGauley, and myself.

Hibbing is indeed a remarkable town. In addition to the authors above, Hibbing was the birthplace of Baseball Hall of Fame inductee Roger Maris of the New York Yankees, and the hometown of Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Kevin McHale of the Boston Celtics.

Note the yearbook photo (Hibbing High School Hematite, 1959) for graduate Robert Zimmerman, i.e. Bob Dylan:

Bob (Dylan) Zimmerman’s photo from the Hibbing High School Hematite yearbook, in which he hopes “to join ‘Little Richard.'” For a future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, his resume of Latin Club and Social Studies Club belie his pending fame.

To dive deeper into Dylan’s Hibbing roots, click on the image below to reach the Amazon link to The Doctor and Mr. Dylan:

KIRKUS REVIEW

In this debut thriller, tragedies strike an anesthesiologist as he tries to start a new life with his son.

Dr. Nico Antone, an anesthesiologist at Stanford University, is married to Alexandra, a high-powered real estate agent obsessed with money. Their son, Johnny, an 11th-grader with immense potential, struggles to get the grades he’ll need to attend an Ivy League college. After a screaming match with Alexandra, Nico moves himself and Johnny from Palo Alto, California, to his frozen childhood home of Hibbing, Minnesota. The move should help Johnny improve his grades and thus seem more attractive to universities, but Nico loves the freedom from his wife, too. Hibbing also happens to be the hometown of music icon Bob Dylan. Joining the hospital staff, Nico runs afoul of a grouchy nurse anesthetist calling himself Bobby Dylan, who plays Dylan songs twice a week in a bar called Heaven’s Door. As Nico and Johnny settle in, their lives turn around; they even start dating the gorgeous mother/daughter pair of Lena and Echo Johnson. However, when Johnny accidentally impregnates Echo, the lives of the Hibbing transplants start to implode. In true page-turner fashion, first-time novelist Novak gets started by killing soulless Alexandra, which accelerates the downfall of his underdog protagonist now accused of murder. Dialogue is pitch-perfect, and the insults hurled between Nico and his wife are as hilarious as they are hurtful: “Are you my husband, Nico? Or my dependent?” The author’s medical expertise proves central to the plot, and there are a few grisly moments, as when “dark blood percolated” from a patient’s nostrils “like coffee grounds.” Bob Dylan details add quirkiness to what might otherwise be a chilly revenge tale; we’re told, for instance, that Dylan taught “every singer with a less-than-perfect voice…how to sneer and twist off syllables.” Courtroom scenes toward the end crackle with energy, though one scene involving a snowmobile ties up a certain plot thread too neatly. By the end, Nico has rolled with a great many punches.

Nuanced characterization and crafty details help this debut soar.

HARVARD APPLICATION SHORT STORY: “THE AMAZEMENT OF ALL”

January 30, 2024January 30, 2024THE ANESTHESIA CONSULTANT Leave a comment

Harvard University

Rick Novak writes:

As a high school senior in the Northern Minnesota iron mining town of Hibbing High School, I applied for admission to Harvard University. As part of the application back then, Harvard asked for a “personal statement,” without any specifics regarding what the candidate should write about. As an aspiring writer at the age of 17, I chose to respond with a 700-word short story, “The Amazement of All.” I believed the story provided insight into the type of rascals who lived my unique home town, how they behaved and felt, as well as my own personal values and writing style. The story worked, as I was accepted by Harvard. In one of the significant crossroads in my life, I chose to pass on Harvard and enroll at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. At that time, at the age of 17, I had never traveled east of Duluth, I had never been on an airplane or a train, and I felt more comfortable staying in the Midwest where I grew up.

I’ve always been proud of this, my first short story, which follows below:

The Amazement of All

Zeke Johnson pushed through the door of the Corner Bar and peeled off his wool stocking hat and leather gloves. It was twelve degrees below zero in the Minnesota night he left outside. He welcomed the warm air, the smoky haze, and the beery smell inside his second home. “Cab Driver” by the Mills Brothers played on the jukebox. Zeke mounted a barstool and sang out, “Cab Driver, drive by Mary’s place. . . .” His drinking buddies Tony and Randy, already lined up at the rail and on their second beer, chimed in the next line in the chorus, “Doop doobie do, Doop doop doobie do.”

This was Zeke’s ritual each day. After his shift driving a 40-ton dump truck, hauling iron ore from the depths of the Hull-Rust Mahoning mine, he met up with fellow miners to drink, smoke, and raise hell at the Corner. He made fifty-seven round trips between the pit and the crusher today. It was time to reward himself with some frosty mugs of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The bartender slid the first foaming glass across to Zeke, who chugged it down in one long draw—one of his singular talents. The Mills Brothers sang, “Cab Driver, Better take me home.” Zeke joined in with the next line and crooned, “I guess I’ll always be alone.”Tony said, “How’s she hanging, Zeke?”“Same shit, different day,” Zeke answered. “One day I’ll die on the job, with my monster ass melded into the seat of my monster truck.”

Zeke felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around to see a hunchbacked old fellow curled over the bar rail on his left. The man wore a faded yellow Minnesota Vikings cap pulled down and shading his face. Bloodshot eyes peered up at Zeke from beneath the brim. The man hadn’t shaved for days, and gray stubble armored his chin. A single tooth sprung from his lower jaw, a solitary pearly stalagmite in a gaping cave. His breath smelled like rancid bologna. Zeke had never seen the man at the Corner Bar before, and had no interest in looking at him for another second. He turned back toward Tony and Randy.

The tap on his shoulder came again. Zeke fired up a Marlboro, inhaled deeply, turned, and exhaled smoke into the old man’s face. “What’s up, Mac?” he said.

“No faith,” the man said.

Zeke’s eyebrows shot up, and he laughed out loud. “No faith? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Listening to you. Watching you. You’re down. No hope.”

“I just got done hauling 2,000 tons of rock so some asshole in Pittsburg can make a million dollars off it, and all I can afford is a barstool in this shithole, sitting next to a jerk-off like you.”

The man’s head rocked left and right. “Your anger is misplaced. You have a job. You are young, and probably healthy. You’re blessed.”

“Blessed? Maybe the last time I sneezed, somebody said ‘Bless you.’ That’s as close to blessed I’m gonna be.” Zeke turned back to his buddies, who joined in laughter with him.

“God is with you,” the old man said. “I see it. I know it. You need to see it and know it too.”

“God never did nothing for me,” Zeke said. “and all I want to see and know is when you’re going to crawl back into the hole you were hatched from.”

The old man shook his head again, and reached into the breast pocket of his threadbare denim shirt. “God is with you,” he repeated. “I’m going to show you.” He pulled a quarter from his pocket, and held it out in his open palm toward Zeke, Tony, and Randy. He turned the quarter over from side to side and said, “Heads there’s a God, and tails there’s no God.” Without another word, he flipped the coin high into the air.

Zeke, Tony, and Randy craned their necks to trace the parabola of the coin’s path as it rose, spun, and descended through smoky air. To the amazement of all, the quarter reached the surface of the bar and landed in the most peculiar way.

The coin stood balanced on its edge.

RICK NOVAK’S BIOGRAPHY

July 18, 2014November 21, 2023THE ANESTHESIA CONSULTANT Leave a comment

Before writing The Doctor and Mr. Dylan, Rick Novak worked as a clinical anesthesiologist, medical director, and expert witness in Northern California. Rick was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, the son to a welding foreman and a homemaker. Rick’s mother read two books per week, and Rick developed the same habit, frequently bicycling the four blocks from their home to the public library to pick out new material. He graduated from Hibbing High School in 1972, and was accepted to Harvard College. For his Harvard application essay, Rick wrote a short story about God revealing Himself to two drunks in a Minnesota tavern.

Hibbing High School Auditorium, Hibbing, Minnesota

Rick declined Harvard and enrolled instead at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he received a degree in Chemistry in 1976. From 1973-1977 Rick worked five summers with United States Steel in the iron ore mines near Hibbing. He played on the United States Junior Men’s Curling championship teams in 1974 and 1975.

Rick then studied medicine at the University of Chicago School, graduated with an MD in 1980, and moved to California the following day to become an intern at Stanford Hospital.

He spent the next thirty-plus years at Stanford, where he served as an intern, a resident in internal medicine, an emergency room faculty member, an anesthesia resident, and finally as an Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Anesthesia and Deputy Chief of the Anesthesia Department at Stanford.

Rick’s writing career blossomed in the role of Deputy Chief, where he authored a monthly column in the department newsletter. The theme of each essay centered on the differences between the private practice of anesthesia and the university-based teaching practice of anesthesia. He began posting these essays on The Anesthesia Consultant website (theanesthesiaconsultant.com) in 2010. Readership grew, and now hundreds of thousands of people visit the website each year.

Beginning in 2001, Dr. Novak developed an interest in anesthesia medical-legal consultation, a role that drew him into the courtroom as an expert witness.

Rick’s lifelong dream of creating entertaining fiction led him to imagine a story: the plot dealt with an anesthesia complication, a crumbling marriage, a son’s quest for elite college admission, and a courtroom drama, all set in his and Bob Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Three years of writing and rewriting yielded the manuscript of The Doctor and Mr. Dylan. In 2014, literary agent Anne Devlin believed the story was a winner, and sold the book to its publisher.

Rick continues his work in clinical anesthesia at Stanford Hospital and at Waverley Surgery Center in Palo Alto, California. He lives with his three sons, Zachary, Theo, and Oliver, and passes on his love of academics and reading to them.

Rick’s second novel, Doctor Vita, was published in 2019. His third novel, Call From the Jailhouse, is due in 2023.