The People in the Trees is a literary novel structured on the actual career and crimes of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. Like Gajdusek, our narrator, Norton Perina is a doctor who makes a major medical discovery in the South Pacific, winning the Nobel Prize in medicine. He then adopts over fifty children from the place where he did his fieldwork, before his life is undone by verified accusations of systematic sexual abuse of his adopted children. I don't know much about Gajdusek beyond the Wikipedia summary, so I can't say what's lifted aside from these major points, but it's a clear inspiration.

Norton is born in Indiana, drifts through medical school, and as a adventure finds himself on a three person expedition to a remote island in the South Pacific. There, deep in the jungle, he discovers a tribe of primitive people who have achieved a limited kind of immortality. The flesh of a turtle halts aging, except for the brain. People can live for centuries, but experience severe mental decline. Norton parley's his discovery into immense scientific success, but the new notoriety of the islands destroys them in a medical imperialist goldrush. As a matter of amends, Norton finds himself adopting a child or two from the islands on each one of his yearly trips, but his beneficence conceals a lust, which is his undoing. The book is structured as a series of letter's to Norton's closest friend and scientific collaborator, who adds commentary in footnotes, and they're monstrous, arrogant, banal, and utterly compelling.

Literary fiction is not my thing, and the basic outlines of Norton/Gajdusek's life are strong enough to hang a lot of story on, but this novel feels blinkered by its points of view so close to the narrator, and it's sense of Norton's righteousness even in the face of his sins. I'm not sure what the right balance of sympathy for a monster is, but this novel doesn't quite hit it. Very good, a hair from great.