In Kate Weinberg’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Her, a young British woman ironically named Vita suffers from a ghastly, debilitating condition that doctors have no name for. She calls its worst symptom, a crushing tornado of pain and helplessness, The Pit. Because Vita’s condition is unidentifiable, doctors won’t attempt to treat it. From there comes the diagnosis that gives the book its title.
The reader might think that Vita’s mysterious illness has something to do with the painful events in her past: the deaths of her mother and sister, a wicked stepmother, the boyfriend who got away, a stuttering career in the performing arts. Vita lives in a weirdly laid out basement apartment with Max, a surgeon who cares for her but too often treats her like one of his “really sick” patients. She spends much time contemplating her goldfish, Whitney Houston, and she’s visited now and then by the ghost of Renaissance soldier and poet Luigi da Porto. (He was the author of the original Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare pinched later on. Vita wrote a screenplay about him that went nowhere). Just as Whitney spins in her goldfish bowl, Vita spins in her unhappiness, and Luigi spins in his memories of the woman who jilted him after he came back as broken from war as Vita is broken from her life.
Then, one day there’s a leak from the upstairs apartment. Max isn’t home, and Vita must leave her bed to interact with her neighbors, the ebullient and not-quite-elderly Mrs. Rothwell, and Jesse, an American who helps Mrs. Rothwell around the house. Vita befriends both immediately. Is this her first step on the path to health?
Weinberg, author of The Truants, packs a lot into this slender novel. There’s rage at a medical establishment that won’t take women’s pain seriously, and a cargo ship’s tonnage of familial trauma. But there’s also the life-enhancing, life-saving power of love and friendship, and the strength of Vita’s unquenchable need to be healthy in body and mind. Maybe her name isn’t so ironic after all.