DIALOGUES WITH THE WISE WOMAN

A depressed pianist turns to a philosophically minded psychologist for help in this work featuring fictional dialogues.

George Sistern falls into a deep depression after he’s scammed out of a few hundred dollars by a reprobate con artist. Although the financial hit he suffers is minor, he can’t seem to get past the humiliation of his gullibility. In addition, his life in general seems stalled—a 46-year-old pianist, he’s alone and has never been in a serious relationship, and his aspirations for musical greatness have gone unrealized. He turns to Mildred Markowitz for help—she’s a psychologist with academic training in philosophy as well. In fact, she believes that the “utilization of both psychology and philosophy can help guide a person to make more sensible decisions.” Mildred is a kind of matronly Socratic figure as the book’s title suggests, if Socrates were sensitively empathetic—she’s “a brilliant, wonderful, insightful woman who was kind, caring, loving, and compassionate.” But she’s also argumentatively spirited and bracingly candid, as she demonstrates during a long debate over prison reform with Irwin Markov, a professor of philosophy and theology as well as a devout Roman Catholic. The work is a series of dialogues between the principal characters—the book as a whole has more of a kinship to a play than a novel, an artistic form that highlights its character as a lecture. Moreover, the grift George falls for is peculiar in its convolution and obviousness—he is tricked into staking a poker player in Las Vegas, a woman who radiates nihilistic untrustworthiness and is predictably bamboozled.

The strongest element of Devens’ book is the portrayal of Mildred—her combination of sensitive thoughtfulness and intellectual provocation remains captivating. She is a somewhat combative 67-year-old woman, but not cantankerous; there is a breezy playfulness to her cerebral pugilism. But the work is a bit exhausting as a drama—in a prefatory note, the author announces his aim to “illustrate my philosophy through the dialogue of fictional characters,” an anticipation of the sermon to follow. The writing is sometimes bloodless, as if the color of ordinary speech were deliberately exsanguinated—at one point, the wife and daughter of a man George meets at a cocktail party are described as “his greatest values.” This paucity of dramatic power could be understandable if readers were compensated with philosophical depth and rigor, but that is seldom the case. Unfortunately, much of the counsel Mildred dispenses is banal, the kind of stuff found in some self-help books. Her principal lesson is the value of self-esteem, which she calls an “irreducible primary”: “Self-esteem is having a basic love for yourself. It doesn’t mean we love everything we do on a daily basis. But we believe in our value, and we believe in our efficacy. If we don’t love something about ourself, we change it if we can. If it’s something that can’t be changed, like our height, we accept it as a part of reality. And we don’t base our self-esteem on what others think of us or think should be improved about us.” Despite its brevity, this book often becomes an endurance test for readers, a tantalizing but flawed philosophical meditation.

An intriguing but uneven series of philosophical reflections.