There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot.
Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book.
($50,000 ad/promo author tour)įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. A marvelous examination of how psychiatrists actually think, building to a vision of a community healthy and mature enough to confront its deepest and most persistent fears. The student teaches the master as Carol, without violating her confidences, draws therapeutic strategies from Ernest and ``treats'' Marshal-or, rather, forces him to treat himself. Marshal, raging, friendless, unable to consult with another practitioner, pours out his soul to a lawyer, Ernest's patient Carol. The con man reads Marshal's vulnerabilities perfectly: excessive ambition and love of money. In a nice twist, Ernest's analytic supervisor, Marshal Streider, an upright, formal man who feels Ernest's commitment to complete honesty is naive, enters into an investment with a con man passing as a patient. And sex is not the only tricky boundary that Yalom explores. Carol becomes a true patient and confronts the fears that have tortured her. Ernest is single, lonely, and mightily tempted, but he is also conscientious and honest, and begins to see through Carol's nearly airtight story. The jilted wife, Carol, a ruthless lawyer, blames Ernest and hatches a plot to ruin him by becoming his patient and seducing him. Some years later, one of Ernest's patients, a timid, obsessive man, leaves his wife for a younger woman. His testimony troubles Ernest Lash, the San Francisco practitioner serving on the ethics panel that will ultimately drive Trotter from the field, because Trotter's techniques appear to have delivered the woman from her borderline world of promiscuity and self-mutilation. Yalom begins with the story of Seymour Trotter, an unconventional therapist who has had a long sexual involvement with a female patient 40 years his junior.
The author of the nonfiction Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989) and the novel When Nietzsche Wept (1992) now takes up the most vexing issue facing psychiatry: the boundaries of treatment.
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