“I do not know a better training for a writer than to spend some years in the medical profession,” Somerset Maugham once wrote, describing how his training at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London presented him with “life in the raw” — the substance from which fiction writers educe their stories. Our shame and humiliation, our dread, our useless grasping after the divine: indeed, much of modern literature suggests that God is himself infirm, in dire need of eyeglasses and a hearing aid.