Sickness is such a huge part of life that it's odd how rarely it shows up in fiction. And fiction that is exclusively about sickness is often bad. Philip Roth's novel Everyman is kind of a biography told through sickness, and while it's not as repugnantly narcissistic as Bukowski's later stories about illness and biological breakdown, it's exhausting and dull for such a thin book. Perhaps part of the problem is that authors don't tend to think intensively about disease and the deterioration of the body until it's happening to them, at which point their critical eye suffers from the very same problems it's trying to observe.
Joshua Ferris is a young novelist who is—knock on wood—only at the beginning of what will probably be a long and meaningful career. His first novel, Then We Came to the End, was one of the most notable debuts in recent years, and even though it took place against the most boring setting available to a modern writer—a corporate office—it had a real sense of daring about it, not least of which was because it was entirely written in the first person plural. His sophomore novel, The Unnamed, is all about illness and how it affects those around us, and it's a remarkably assured, complex look at a subject that has doomed the biggest names of modern fiction to failure.
The Unnamed's protagonist, Tim Farnsworth, is a successful, middle-aged lawyer with an incurable disease. For no apparent reason, he will suddenly start walking, with no direction in mind. Once, while putting out the trash late at night, his own body hijacks him:
He looked down at his legs. It was like watching footage of legs walking from the point of view of the walker. That was the helplessness, this was the terror: the brakes are gone, the steering wheel has locked, I am at the mercy of the wayward machine.
When he falls into one of these fits, Farnsworth walks for miles and miles, until his body literally can walk no more. Doctors eventually name his odd disease—"benign idiopathic perambulation"—but they can offer no cure. Out of frustration, his wife and daughter handcuff him to a bed, but his legs still pump until they're bloody with bedsores. By afflicting Farnsworth with a silly-sounding disease, and then transforming it into something truly horrifying, Ferris puts the reader in a position akin to watching a family member go through the process of serious disease: It begins as something abstract, a clinical-sounding word, and then it proceeds to tear your loved one apart from the inside out. Like Ferris's first novel, The Unnamed is often very funny, but the respectful, honest way it portrays illness makes it something serious and important. 
