Fiction: ‘The Covenant of Water’ by Abraham Verghese

For the fiction writer, expertise has become something of a superpower. There was a time, back when literature enjoyed a central position in culture, that novels were commonly informed by worldly experience; statesmen, civil servants, scientists and other specialists were apt to have a hand in the game. Today the economic realities are such that just about the only professional designation realistically available to writers is writing instructor, which accounts for the hermeticism of so much current literature—its tendency to be mostly about itself—and may explain the popularity of exceptions such as Abraham Verghese, a doctor turned smash bestseller.

Mr. Verghese, who was raised in an Indian family in Ethiopia, practiced medicine in India and the U.S., and his first book, the 1994 memoir “My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story,” elucidated his work with the invisible victims of AIDS/HIV in rural Tennessee in the 1980s. His breakout was the 2009 novel “Cutting for Stone,” a sprawling family saga whose plot hinges on disease and surgical procedures. The title derives from a line in the Hippocratic Oath warning against medical hubris, and the novel’s signature move is to carry questions of ethics, duty, love and faith directly to the drama of the operating table.