The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

Born Wrong, by the Standards of His World

Samuel Hill — Sam Hell, as the children who meet him immediately rename him — is born with ocular albinism, a condition that gives him brilliant red eyes and poor vision. In the Catholic community of Burlingame, California in the mid-1960s, this marks him immediately as different, as singled out, as the subject of theological interpretation. His mother, a woman of fierce faith, tells him he has the eyes of God, that his difference is a gift. The children who torment him are working from a different theology.

Robert Dugoni’s The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell follows Sam from his 1960s childhood through his adult life as a physician, structured as a memoir that Sam is writing in middle age as a way of understanding how he became who he is. The retrospective structure allows Dugoni to use dramatic irony effectively — the reader knows that Sam survived his childhood, which allows the childhood material to be devastating without being hopeless.

The Three of Them

The novel’s greatest gift is its supporting cast, particularly Ernie Cantwell and Mickie Kennedy, who become Sam’s closest friends. Ernie is a Black kid in a school where being Black is itself a form of outsider status; Mickie is a girl who refuses the diminishment her community has prepared for her. Together, the three of them form the kind of friendship that forms under adversarial conditions — tested, deepened by crisis, and durable in a way that more comfortable friendships aren’t.

Dugoni writes the three of them with affection and specificity. They are not simply devices for exploring Sam’s development; they are complete people whose own stories run parallel to his. Mickie, in particular, is one of the finest female characters in Dugoni’s work — funny, fierce, and written with genuine understanding of what it was like to be an ambitious girl in that particular world.

The Catholic Setting

The Catholic community of 1960s California is rendered with the kind of nuanced representation that avoids both nostalgia and polemic. The faith at the heart of this community is real and provides genuine comfort and structure; it also has rules and hierarchies that punish difference and enforce conformity. Sam’s mother’s fierce Catholicism — her conviction that her son’s red eyes are a sign of divine favour — is both touching and sometimes damaging in its expression.

The nuns who run Sam’s school include figures of cruelty and figures of unexpected grace, and Dugoni distinguishes between them with care. Father Brogan, the priest who becomes a kind of mentor, is one of the more thoughtfully drawn religious figures in recent fiction — complicated without being simply a hypocrite or simply a saint.

The Doctor He Becomes

The adult sections of the novel are less immediate than the childhood material — the red eyes that made Sam a target have made him also a physician whose visual impairment pushes him toward ophthalmology. The irony is not laboured; it’s simply true to the way that our wounds sometimes become our vocations.

Sam’s adult life involves losses and choices that Dugoni handles with restraint. The retrospective structure helps here — Sam the narrator has processed much of what Sam the character is experiencing, which prevents the adult sections from becoming overwrought.

A Book About Faith in the Largest Sense

Underneath the coming-of-age narrative and the friendship story, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell is a meditation on what it means to believe — in God, in human goodness, in the possibility of a life built out of unpromising materials. Sam’s faith, and his mother’s, are both tested in the course of the novel, and neither comes out unchanged. Dugoni does not insist on a resolution to these questions; he insists only on taking them seriously.

This earnestness distinguishes the novel from more ironic literary fiction about faith and from more commercial faith-based fiction. It occupies a useful middle ground: honest about suffering, hopeful without denying it.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Dugoni’s most ambitious novel — a genuinely moving coming-of-age story with two of the finest supporting characters in recent literary fiction.