A richly detailed but uneven tale about the marriage of a psychologist and a psychiatrist.
A novel focuses on the strained relationship of two California psychotherapists.
Lingen centers his tale on psychologist Petter Lyngen and his wife, psychiatrist Thea Elden. The author, a licensed clinical psychologist, shows how they navigate not only the turmoil of their own marriage, but also the demands of their separate practices and all of the patients they interact with every day. Petter and Thea live in a condo in San Francisco’s Marina district and have been in couples therapy for a whole range of problems between them, including Petter’s buried resentment that Thea makes more money than he does and is better educated (she went to Stanford; he attended California State). Despite these and other issues, the couple seem reasonably happy at the start of the story, bantering, showering together, and enjoying long bike rides. Through them and their patients, Lingen is able to dramatize a wide variety of psychological complaints as well as the office politics and inner workings of psych departments and treating hospitals. Readers also get an extensive guided tour of the psychological backgrounds and key developmental issues faced by both Petter and Thea, including a shared history of parental abuse. This material helps ground them in the imagination as they face an array of people with psychological troubles as well as their own complicated feelings for each other
These glimpses into the professional world of psychotherapy are related with the detail and confidence that only an insider could provide. Lingen imbues some of his professional and interpersonal scenes with a very dry sense of humor, a tone that extends to the book’s abundant sexually explicit content. But the potential for a great psychology novel is blunted by several narrative flaws, starting with the work’s self-indulgent length (595 pages). Petter and Thea are seldom rendered as actual human beings; too often they’re depicted as stereotypes, calling each other “my love” while lounging in their condo living room reading their professional journals. Thea employs her “brilliant medically analytic mind” and reels off stiff exposition like “Ketamine enhances domaminergic neurotransmission to NMDA receptor sites in both the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.” At one point, she asserts to her husband: “As you are always saying, Petter…you can’t secure a hook inside someone’s chest unless there is something in there upon which you can secure the hook.” This decision to portray Petter and particularly Thea as vamping, hyperintellectual androids—him a passive-aggressive snob and her a controlling bully—undercuts the effectiveness of the story in humanizing the world of professional psychology. Likewise, the author’s choice to have characters lapse almost at random into all-caps profanity almost always seems forced and artificial, further driving a wedge between the players and the audience’s empathy. The characters are forever dissecting their motivations for doing the things they do, but the narrative seldom gives readers reasons to care about those actions.
A richly detailed but uneven tale about the marriage of a psychologist and a psychiatrist.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-830131-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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