Two guys’ excellent kidney adventure

NONFICTION

Imagine getting an urgent phone call while you're on vacation with your family. The caller is your black-sheep cousin, and he's got bad news. He's dying of end-stage renal disease, he says, and he asks you to meet him in China so the two of you can buy a replacement kidney on the black market.

You're a good person, right? So maybe you're willing to consider his request. But what if this cousin previously had turned you into the FBI for exaggerating your income on a mortgage application? And what if he had hired a group code-named the Motor Men to kill another relative?

Still feeling generous?

Apparently, Daniel Asa Rose, who was mountain biking with his family in Colorado when he got the call from Cousin Larry, is an excessively generous man. After a night of soul searching, he agrees to help Larry, whom Rose describes thus in his immensely entertaining book about the experience: "He calls himself a professor, but really he's just an adjunct at some Catholic college down South, with links to the underworld and a sometimes-lucrative sideline of suing people. Mostly he's an inventor of get-poor-quick schemes."

If you're reading this aloud, take a deep breath before tackling the next sentence because Rose's book boasts the longest subtitle you're likely to encounter this side of a doctoral dissertation about polymers. It's called "Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant and Save His Life."

I'll give you a moment to catch your breath.

Rose, an O. Henry Prize winner who has written for The New Yorker, Esquire and the New York Times Magazine, may be generous to a fault, but he's not unaware of the risks his trip to China entails.

It's illegal for Westerners to receive a transplant in China, and the possibility that a black-market kidney may have come from an unlucky political prisoner gives Rose pause. But as he tells a fellow Jew in Beijing, "[W]hen it's your own relative's life on the line, you tend to see a few more shades of gray."

Cousin Larry's moral reasoning is less nuanced. "Here's my position: This nonprisoner needs a kidney," he tells Rose. "Execute someone of my blood type!"

As it turns out, that may be exactly what the doctor orders.

"Larry's Kidney" is a quick, funny book crammed with colorful characters and zippy dialogue that occasionally seems too funny to be true. Are people really always this effervescent? Don't they tell jokes that fail? Is life really a screwball comedy with an international cast of multilingual quick wits?

Not that I'm complaining. As Rose writes of a Chinese waitress's giggle, "I would say it sounds scripted, except it's so charming."

Exactly.

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.