My Name Is Lucy Barton – Elizabeth Strout’s Novel about A Woman Who (apparently) Comes From Nothing

I read Olive Kitteredge, Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, every spring.  I use it to teach my graduate students how personality works – and how it changes.  Each chapter in Olive Kitteredge mentions Olive, but that is all that some of them do.  Each chapter is, essentially, a short story and many have as their focus people other than Olive – but they are all people who are related to her and most all of them live in the small seaside town in Maine that she inhabits.  Across the course of the novel, my students come to love Olive – a woman who is very difficult to live with.  She is blunt to the point of being acerbic.  She fends off attempts that others make to connect with her and to love her.  She is dour and has a jaded view of life and, despite loving her son deeply, she has abused him.  And yet, across the arc of the novel, which travels through decades as well as multiple people’s lives, she evolves in ways that are believable and feel true.  She becomes more aware of her love for life and for people.  And we – my students and me – root for her and struggle to understand the potential for and the limits to change that her personality imposes – while also trying to get a handle on many of the other characters in the book from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

I learned today in a New York Times article about Diane Arbus, that Frank O’Connor, in his book about the short story, “The Lonely Voice,” characterized novels as being about the ways that people fit into society, but he maintained that short stories are about loners: People who don’t fit in – people who are essentially misfits.  In that sense, Olive Kitteredge, as a novel length collection of short stories that are strung together, tells us about many misfits.  It also helps us understand how a battle-ax like Olive can be both a loner – a misfit, one who rejects the world, and, as the object of a novel, if not a person who fits in, one who grows to be slightly more open to the possibility that society might have something to offer her.

My Name Is Lucy Barton introduces us, in a novella, to another woman from the margins of society.  Her mother-in-law characterizes her as having “come from nothing.”  And we learn, in bits and pieces, and never completely, just where it is that she comes from as she writes a memoir about being ill of some unknown infection after a routine appendix operation and having her mother come to stay for a week of her five week hospital stay in the mid-1980s.  Lucy has married, has two young children, lives in New York City, has published a couple of things in literary magazines, and her mother travels from her rural hometown of Amgash, Illinois to stand vigil with her in her hospital room that has a view of the Chrysler building and to tell her stories about Amgash and to jog her memories about her origins.

Lucy Barton is a woman – a writer – who is lonely.  She says, “Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”   She meets another writer, Sarah Payne, in a clothing store in New York.  She discovers Payne is a writer when she asks for fashion advice, and then goes to a writing workshop Payne teaches.  After Sarah is harshly judged by a psychoanalyst who is a student in the workshop, Sarah teaches Lucy, and the rest of the class, to come to the page without judgement.  And this is what Elizabeth Strout does so well.  I use Olive Kitteredge to teach because the characters in the novel are the people that clinical psychologists will work with.  Some are out and out crazy, and most are deeply disturbed; sorrowful or anxious, they can be diagnosed and packaged and we can come up with a treatment plan for them – or we can do what Strout does – we can appreciate them and their lives and the difficulties they face and the ways in which society has not provided an answer for them.  We can appreciate them rather than pity them – be kind and generous and connect with them – to link them to ourselves and to the people around them – to figure out how to love them by, as Payne urges us, coming to them without judgement.

Lucy Barton’s mother, when she talks to her in the hospital, tells her stories.  She tells her stories about the people in Amgash.  They are not generous stories.  They are gossipy stories.  They lack important details but they also convey something very important about the person being gossiped about.  And they serve Lucy well.  They – along with her mother’s reports of her dreams – dreams that foretell the future and contain nothing bad about Lucy so her mother knows that Lucy will recover from this illness – the stories and the dreams are the thread that connect Lucy to her mother.  It is a thin thread – there is mostly silence, especially around the issues that are most important between them, but it is a thread that is sufficient, apparently, to sustain Lucy to connect – or reconnect – this lonely person to her mother and, beyond that, to the world.

Sarah Payne, the writer, teaches Lucy how to love her characters.  She tells her, “Never ever defend your work.  This is a story about love, you know that… This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter.  Imperfectly.  Because we all love imperfectly.  But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.”  And we hear in this – at the center of this odd, dreamlike story about a mother who dreams about her daughter, and doesn’t understand her; a mother who has had next to nothing and has exposed her daughter to the cold, to loneliness, and to ridicule – that we need to hear these things and to know that they don’t negate the power of that very slender thread that connects them.

Anna Ornstein, a psychoanalyst who as a young girl survived both the work camp depicted in Schindler’s List and Auschwitz, noted that she survived them through luck, but also because she was with her family.  Others who survived the camps were in family groups – and if their family was not with them, they created family-like groups with a few of the people who surrounded them.  Obviously, millions of people in family groups died – she made it clear that she was not blaming those who died for being disconnected, but she noted that when someone became disconnected – or came to the camp disconnected and did not make connections, they died very quickly.

Lucy got out of Amgash.  She liked books and she liked to study – the library and the school were warm and provided respite from her home.  Neither her brother nor her sister took to school, and they stayed in and near Amgash.  Lucy left Amgash, but she had the ability to do that in part because, in spite of all the poverty and abuse, there was a connection with her mother – there was love.  And the realities of the situation did not negate that love, but were the context in which it occurred.

To see things as they are – to avoid whitewashing them – but also to avoid judging them harshly – to report them – to be curious about them – this is the (ideal) analytic attitude that Strout exemplifies, in both Olive Kitteredge and in My Name Is Lucy Barton.  Obviously, as her example with the psychoanalyst in Sarah Payne’s class exemplifies, we can (and do) misuse our ability to observe.  We connect things in order to judge, to distance, to be snide and be better than.  But, at our best, we use our ability to see and hear and piece things together to connect with each other.

This process comes with a cost.  When Sarah Payne teaches, Lucy can see the energy draining from her.  Connecting with others directly and clearly – being level headed and calling things as we see them – it takes effort – sometimes tremendous effort.  Especially when we work from the position of loneliness, when we work from inside the disconnected aspects of the people that we are connecting with, rather than offering platitudes or simply telling them to buck up or providing whitewash about the virtues of connection (something that I fear I sometimes do in these posts – including this one - and in the rest of my life), we can become depleted.  Because connecting from that place of disconnection – of loneliness – of being the oddball, the weirdo, the object of ridicule, goes against the grain of who we, in some very deep sense, want to be.  And yet it is the only path out of loneliness.  There is a bleak kind of beauty to connecting through our loneliness, one that Strout beautifully portrays in this book.

I went to a presentation this week at my local institute.  It was a presentation about Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist who wrote about Hollywood stars during the 40s, 50s, and 60s.  Hopper, portrayed realistically and harshly in the recent film Trumbo, dished dirt and 36 million readers weekly lapped it up.  They wrote her letters, and the presenter had been to the archives and had read them and brought copies of them to the presentation.  Some of the letter writers were clearly disturbed – writing in less and less organized ways about this tramp and that tramp in Hollywood.  And Hedda answered some of the letters personally, but fed her readers information on a regular basis.  And it led me to wonder whether she served an important function in an increasingly large and impersonal society – one in which the threads of gossip that a small town of Amgash provided – threads that could wound, but that could also bind, were being lost as we moved into our lonely lives of watching others live, first on the movie screen and then on our Television sets; it led me to wonder whether Hedda served a function similar to the one that Lucy’s mother served (and Sarah Payne – and Lucy as author – more importantly - Strout serves and even, ironically, that the movies and TV shows themselves serve), creating a narrative – a story – one where we come to know and care about the characters and have a sense of how they work, and therefore have a sense of how we fit with them – so that we feel somewhat less lonely and isolated – we belong to a community, one that our story tellers create for us.

This is a challenging business.  The business of telling stories and doing it in a fashion that respects the people we are talking about (Hedda Hopper respected her readers, I think, more than her subjects – something that led her readers to feel connected to her – rather than to each other and to the stars – or to the stars as objects of disdain rather than veneration or concern).  I think it is easier, in some ways, to craft a connection – whether it is Strout’s (and Payne’s and Lucy’s) connection of respect or Hopper’s and the analyst in the story’s snide connection – when writing than verbally and in person.  Perhaps that is why I post so frequently – I can control the medium more fully (or think I can).  I just received evaluations of the class I referenced.  While the students appreciated Olive Kitteredge, I clearly miscommunicated some important information in the class more generally.  One of my experiments in teaching went wildly awry.  Similarly, experiments in communicating with my patients can go wildly awry.  I will be seeing many of the students in the fall, and we can address some of the issues in their feedback and perhaps resolve them; I almost always see my patients again, and we frequently work to rework and better understand what we each have been trying to communicate.  This business of not being alone, of not being isolated, is challenging business indeed.      

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Kirsten Dahl discusses The Glass Menagerie – The Flight of the Male Adolescent from His Mom

Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie was used by Kirsten Dahl in a workshop at my institute to illustrate not just the challenges of being the mother to an adolescent male (or being an adolescent son who has a mother), but also of being the female analyst of an adolescent male (or being an adolescent boy in analysis with a female analyst).  The Glass Menagerie was particularly appropriate to this endeavor because, as she points out, what is called Williams “autobiographical” play is one that he intentionally made not about the facts of his adolescence, but about his psychological experience of it.  The mother in the play is not the mother that he had in real life (a woman who may or may not have had 17 suitors come calling in one evening), but the woman he engaged with in his other real, but internal life.  Dahl used as evidence of this two things: first, the stage directions include the use of magic lantern type devices to project words and images on the wall – the father of the protagonist, Tom, for instance is sometimes projected on the wall and sometimes not and the entire play is to be seen through a scrim so that it is hazy or dreamlike; and second, she says, Williams was relieved that when his mother sat with him and saw the play on Broadway, she did not recognize herself.  Instead, she was proud of his accomplishment – proud of the art that he had created.

Dahl, herself, is an accomplished analyst.  A faculty member at Yale, she has written extensively about child analysis and about gender and sexuality.  I was embarrassed that I had not read her work, and somewhat intimidated by the impending visit of someone so notable.   For homework, I watched a version of the play with Katherine Hepburn and a very young Sam Waterston as Tom, which I found on YouTube.  I have since found that the critics recommended a version directed by Paul Newman to showcase the acting talent of his wife Joanne Woodward and a young John Malkovich as Tom, also available onYouTube.  Dahl was introduced by one of the directors of our institute who had presented a case to her at a national meeting as being very down to earth, and I found her to be so.  She used the play and a discussion about it as a Friday night lecture that laid the groundwork for a case presentation on Saturday morning where an analyst presented her work with a male patient who was just entering adolescence, and the play and Dahl’s discussion of it nicely resonated with the work that the analyst did with this young man.

One of the ways that I evaluate a workshop or a piece of professional writing is the way the material impacts the clinical work that I do.  One way that I can feel this start is that certain patients are called to mind by the article or book chapter or talk that I am engaged with.  This started to happen on Saturday when the talk – but also my direct experience of Tom and his mother (and sister and the other character in the play – the gentleman caller Tom brings home to see his crippled sister), shaped my experience of the clinical presentation of the case.  But this has continued to unfold during the week as my perception of the people that I work with – and even more importantly, the way that I work with those people, is shaped, in what I experience as positive means, by both the play itself and by Dahl’s interpretation of it.  This is, of course, validating as I devote a fair amount of time to looking at the relationship between art and psychoanalysis in these posts – and I hope that my efforts mirror in some small way her very astute ones.

Despite the importance of Williams the artist in the product of the play, Dahl tried to direct us away from the biographical implications of the play and instead to appreciate it as a representation of Tom’s inner world.  By understanding Tom’s inner world as a legitimate focus of attention, Dahl was moving us from the world of things and relationships and people to the world of images and psychological objects and fantasies.  This is the world of the analyst – and this is one of the ways that this workshop helped me reorient my listening to my patients.  I am less concerned, when I listen to this second perspective, with who did or said what – and more importantly how the patient should or should not respond to all of that, and more concerned with – and curious about – what the patient is thinking about, wondering about, and experiencing.  This shift, at the best moments, allows an analyst to come on board with the mind of the analysand, to join in their subjectivity, as best we are able, rather than to objectify them.

Tom’s subjective world is one in which he is burdened by the needs of a mother whose husband, his father, has left her, and the needs of a sister who is frail and lives in a fantasy world – and fantasy here is a derogatory term, even though, or perhaps partly because we have access to Tom’s fantasy world.  And Tom’s fantasies – his wish to live up to the Shakespeare nickname that his co-worker, the gentleman caller Tom invites to dinner – are in danger of being suffocated by the anxiety of his mother, who is worried about the well-being of her children, which comes through clearly but is an undertone to the clanging bell of concerns about her own well-being – but more centrally her need to puff herself up with her gossamer memories of all the men who came calling – all the opportunities she had that have been wasted by her having pursued the path that has led her to have these two children, children that she loves, adores, but also feels a need to care for and worry about.

And these children – each in their own way - feel a need to care for her in return.  Tom feels torn between his duty of working in the warehouse – a spirit killing worthless job that he is no good at doing – but which keeps the lights on for his mother and sister, and his dreams of running far away – further than distance – indeed, when he does run, he says, “I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places.”  What is he running from?  Even when he is home, he is running to the movies – which also appears to be running to drink and to magic shows and to who knows what other kinds of entertainment.  We can feel the oppression of his mother – of her constant demands, of her intrusion – yelling at him when he is trying to write.  But we also see something else – the desire, expressed in the words of the gentleman caller to Tom’s sister who says, if she were his sister, he would help her see that she is worthy of being loved.  And, if we make one of those leaps that psychoanalysis and the dream-like structure of this play allow us to make, we see that Tom wants to let not just his sister, but his mother know that she is lovely – and that he loves her in ways that would feel incestuous and therefore disgusting if he were to express them directly.

Tom wants to join his father in running – but he also wants to be the man his father could not be.  He wants to stay and tend to the needs of his mother and sister, but to do so would cause lead him to sin – against god, but also against his own nature.  So run he must.  Peter Fonagy talks, in a paper about male sexuality, about the ways in which the incest taboo leads us to procreate productively.  Without it, we would be happy to just stay at home and procreate there.  This play enacts that idea.  Tom must run away from the intense feelings that are stirred by the closeness that he feels to his mother and sister.  And who could blame him?  But this also leaves him feeling adrift – cast out to join the merchant marines – to sail the seas and, in the impending World War, likely to lose his life altogether. 

But wait, you may say, isn’t Williams gay?  How does that complicate things (or simplify them)?  Yes, Williams the playwright was openly and proudly gay in the 40s and 50s when it was anything but easy to do this.  But he did.  One of the things that Dahl referred to – not directly about this, but I think it applies – was the plasticity of gender and sexuality.  It was also somewhat relieving to hear someone who has thought as deeply as she has about these things wonder about the concrete ways that we are currently thinking about gender - with surgical fixes to match the external world with the internal one - and sexuality - as if we are either gay or bi or straight.

She didn’t say this, but I think it to be true and may be an extension of what she was saying, that we are all gay and straight, male and female, and the relationships we have with our family members are potentially relationships with our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers simultaneously in the interaction with any one of them.  The characters in this play represent a relatively traditional nuclear family, but because of the scrim, of the curtain that we see them through, they are free to be whoever and whatever we need them to be, and we can be who we need to be in relationship to them.

So, this play is, at least from Dahl’s perspective, about the ways in which the “failed” treatments of adolescent boys by female treaters, meaning that the boys leave treatment before the analysis is “complete” and all their issues are resolved, may actually be the result of the mobilization of the very forces that the boys need to propel themselves forward in their lives.  Experiencing the analyst as a desired object, one who is both demanding and oppressive and present and open and therefore dangerous, may create the conditions that are necessary for the boy to move away from something that is too comfortable – the caring that occurs in the nuclear family with its incestuous overtones muted by repression – and mutates that into something that is almost conscious, and therefore increasingly uncomfortable and difficult to live with – something that must be fled.  Would that we could all flee it into the fame and fortune that Tennessee Williams discovered!

Instead, we all flee all the time – including analysts who work to solve the problems in the real world rather than to confront the difficulties in the imperfect soup that is our inner world with the interplay between conscious and unconscious elements.  We all flee from the realizations that great art allows us to discover – at least as observers – that we live in worlds that are determined by our internal realities and that, though those inner realities bear some relationship to the external circumstances in which that world was created, they have their own logic, one that we decipher as best we are able through interpretation – of art and of our own complicated ways of seeing the world.  That flight can be tremendously productive - we can produce great works of art and create standards of living that are impressive.  We can also remain in flight - and feel lost if we don't somehow work out that we also deeply love those we are fleeing from.

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About Grace – Anthony Doerr’s pre-Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel

All the Light We Cannot See was such a good novel, it made sense to go back to Doerr’s earlier work and see whether there were other diamonds he had scattered about.  About Grace, both a story about a very weird guy and an allegory about becoming a father, is a diamond, though a diamond in the rough and it is likely, therefore, rough sledding for those who want a book to explain things to them and paradoxically can’t appreciate endless and overly detailed descriptions of how the natural world works.

Becoming a father is a complex, psychologically difficult process.  I was lucky to be part of a group of psychoanalysts who went to a talk back with David Lindsay Abaire after a performance of his play “Rabbit Hole.”  Abaire talked about sitting in class at Julliard and having his teacher tell him to write about what terrifies him.  He remembered thinking, “I’ve got nothing.”  Then he had a child.  Rabbit Hole is a play about a couple who lose a child – and the impact it has on them.  Having a child brings about heights of joy – and depths of terror – terror that is described in excruciating detail in Doerr's book about a long and complicated journey to be able to becoming a parent.

I was ambivalent about having children.  In about 1973 I read a book called The Limits to Growth about the future of the world in which growth occurs exponentially, but our ability to provide resources occurs at a linear rate.  It predicted that we wouldn’t survive past the year 2000.  Based on computer models, the authors decided that we would run out of energy by then – but that if we didn’t, we would have so much pollution that we would suffocate.  After reading that book, I decided that I didn’t want to bring a child into a world that would either leave them stranded to starve or be killed by sludge.  Frankly, though, I suspect this was a cover for a deeper fear – one that is expressed in direct and allegorical forms in this book.

In About Grace, we are introduced to David Winkler, a geeky kid who grows up in Anchorage Alaska.  His primary interest is in snow flakes and he pursues this interest all the way to a Ph.D. in hydrology – the study of water – which he sees as a living force of nature that gets expressed in a myriad of ways, including in the crystalline form of snowflakes.  David also has a special ability.  He has premonitory dreams. These detailed dreams foretell calamities – the first is a man being hit and killed by a bus – that he feels unable to alter when they play out before him in real life. 

David is, throughout the early part of the book, consistently inarticulate about his dreams that predict an event.  We think, at first, that this is because of the trauma of seeing his dreams come to life, but later he continues to be inarticulate in puzzling and even maddening ways.  I think this plays an important role in making the allegory work.  As odd and inarticulate as David is, he is also everyman – or more precisely, everyman’s unconscious – the keeper of dreams – the foreteller of the future – and the part of ourselves that directs our actions in ways that are mystifying to us, precisely because it is an unconscious part of ourselves.  This part is unknown to us, but not solely problematic - it can fuel our most human interactions and can become our closest ally.  

So what is the allegory?  Well, David connects, through one of his premonition dreams, with Sandy, a woman who is married to a deadly dull guy named Warren – a banker who is infertile but doesn’t know it.  David impregnates her – and loves her deeply.  They run away together, have a child named Grace, but then, somehow not surprisingly, David has a dream that, in his attempts to save Grace, she will drown.  He tries, without describing the dream, to get Sandy to move with him away from the house where the dream takes place in order to prevent the events from happening.  Sandy (who also had a premonition dream about meeting David that he knows about – he never tells her his – would be sympathetic, you would think, if he were straightforward with her…) understandably refuses to move for no apparent reason - other than David becoming frantic – so, to save Grace, David runs away.

David and Warren together are, I think, an allegory for the traditional western father.  We work hard (as the Warren parts of ourselves) at a job that is dull, and retreat from the family (Warren plays hockey, which frees Sandy up to have an affair with David that Warren is unaware of).  We do this because we fear the ways in which our closeness might be damaging to our children (and our spouses).  David represents the part of us – the weird, wacky, not very traditionally male part that is a bit crazy – that actually deeply desires a connection with our children – that can’t believe we have been graced with them, and that wants to spend every waking minute admiring every aspect of them – David notices everything about Grace, just as he did about Sandy.  But this closeness feels dangerous – we fear that we will drown our children (the hydrologist’s fear) with our love (I think it is also important that water is frequently used as a symbol of the unconscious).  So we run away to the office and leave the parenting to the women.  When the kid grows up and lands on the analyst’s couch, he will complain about her ruining his life – not me; I did my part; I brought home the bacon and paid for everything; I didn’t drown him.

I have always had a fear of heights.  I have never read this in Freud, but remember being told long before I was an analyst, perhaps by a family member, that Freud said that we don’t fear falling, but jumping, and that has always rung true to me.  So one evening when my son was small enough to ride on my shoulders, he was doing just that as we walked across a high and wide bridge over a river.  I became aware of the sucking feeling – the fear that I would fall – or jump – off the bridge.  Well, if it’s just me, the edge of that fear can actually be an interesting, even exciting edge to ride.  But when my son’s life was at stake, I suddenly became terrified.  Just because I wanted to kill myself was no reason for him to die (if the impact didn't kill him he would surely drown), and I felt like I could not control myself (objectively a pretty irrational fear), and was flat out terrified.  We were walking with a group of people – maybe a festival was going on, and the bridge was closed to traffic.  I made my way to the center of the bridge where I felt only marginally safer.  I, like David, didn’t let anyone know about my inner turmoil.  I didn’t ask for help.  I simply did the best that I could to manage the situation and my terror and got my son safely to the other side – and I’m almost certain no one noticed anything particularly peculiar about what was going on – other than maybe my breaking out in a sweat that, on a hot summer evening, could be attributed to the stroll and to carrying a child.

David runs as far away from Sandy and Grace as he can – he takes a freighter and gets off on a random island – it happens to be the island from which Alexander Hamilton started his rise to fame – and there becomes homeless and destitute.  He does not know what has become of Grace.  Taken in by the post lady, he cares for her daughter Naaliyah, about whom, when she becomes a teenager, he has a premonitory dream.  This time, though, he finally tells someone – the butcher – and the butcher convinces him that – as the butcher presumes was the case for Grace because David ran away (neither David nor the reader know if this is the case), he can do something to prevent the dream about Naaliyah from reaching its awful conclusion (a dream in which Naaliyah will drown).  Now David becomes a stalker – following Naaliyah everywhere (without telling her about the specifics of his dream - just asking a budding marine biologist to avoid boats which she, not surprisingly, does not do) and camping out across the street from her apartment.  He is joined there by Naaliyah’s mother who joins him in taking shifts to keep an eye on Naaliyah.  Creepy.

Can we alter fate?  Can I keep the world from running out of resources or becoming polluted?  (A junior high school science fair project involved engineering solar powered cars…)  More realistically, can I avoid visiting the horrors (OK, I’m being overly dramatic) that my parents visited on me on my children?  For instance, my Dad was a travelling salesman who worked for big corporations.  He was out of town two or three nights every week and we moved frequently when I was a child.  To “fix” this problem, I made sure to get a secure job (I have tenure) at a University which won't necessitate my being transferred, nor will I be on the road.  You’d think that my child would have a very different experience.  But when his mother and I divorced, he was suddenly in one or the other of our homes half of every week.  Both of his parents were “away” half of the time and, though he has not moved from city to city, he has moved from house to house every week.  In some ways this, as profound a re-creation and complication of my childhood as this may be, is a very surface difficulty.  There are much deeper and more troubling perils that lurk in trying not to visit on our children the terrible things we are capable of visiting.

David saved Grace by running away, but this had a terrible impact on her.  She became deeply and powerfully angry with him.  When he tries to reconnect with her (the book starts with this journey, flashes back to set it up, then resumes the journey 200 pages later), she wants nothing to do with him.  Ultimately he makes peace with Warren (a surprisingly easy thing for them to do and, in the allegory, something that makes more sense than in life) and helps Warren care for his grandson – actually takes that over from the guy who couldn’t be bothered by kids and connections.  In the tremendously powerful conclusion to the story, David is able to use his premonition to prove his steadfastness to Grace and thereby create a new bond with her.

I think we all want to be able to be connected with our children.  We struggle to do this, however.  We fear the ways that the world will harm them, but even more, we fear that our contact will somehow damage them – that they will drown in what we would offer them.  So we wall ourselves off from them by walling ourselves from ourselves (Warren and David are depicted as two separate people, disconnected from each other who, when they finally meet up, are friendly enough, but realistically have few shared interests) and more directly from them ( Warren escapes into work, David simply disappears).  At some point, if we are lucky (after 200 pages or so), our unconscious wakes up and propels us into connecting with those we love.  If we let it, it will be persistent (and erratic – the tale of David searching for Grace Winkler hither, thither and yon is a wonderful and disorienting odyssey that leads him, seemingly quite by accident, to the only logical place to be).  We may be old – and we may have lived through a number of near death experiences (our unconscious may, like David, have been all but starved, drowned and lost in the wilderness before being subjected to a deep freeze which finally allows for some clarity), but, should we survive, which, surprisingly we often do, our with to connect will out and it will take our now shaggy selves into the world of connection – which we will still do awkwardly, but lovingly.  Or at least Doerr would have us believe that – and I certainly think that we hope this is how things will work out.

So, this book works, at least for me, on the level of a case study.  David is reminiscent of many, many patients – I have never treated a hydrologist, but he could be a lawyer, physician, research scientist of another stripe, artist, or engineer I have treated.  Each of the many Davids that I have worked with has an intense and powerful interest in some aspect of the world.  This interest is incredibly compelling to them, but can be dull as dishwater to those around them.  Indeed, especially early in the treatment, I sometimes have to fight boredom as I listen to these men.  Their outer worlds can be quite circumscribed, but as they open up, I become fascinated – and frankly so do they.  And as that happens, interestingly, they also become fascinating to others – at least to some others.  Like  a snowflake, they are a particular crystalline form of water that is unique and beautiful.

This book, on the level of a case study, is not for everyone.  There are only so many allusions to water in all its forms – and only so many false starts and periods of deprivation - that some readers will be able to stomach.  Many will put this book down, stultified and mystified by this guy who is rendered in such exquisite – though they will experience it as excruciating - detail.  If that reader can hang in there, they may (or may not) be rewarded by enjoying the beautiful symmetry that emerges – by seeing the structure of a person, a family, a universe.  When I present cases of such men to a professional audience, despite my enthusiasm, many feel it is like watching paint dry and turn away.

On the level of allegory, this book is not about one of those guys but about all of us (or maybe I, as the reluctant but obsessed psychoanalyst, am just the quintessential camper). In so far as it focuses, though, on our role as parent, it is parallel to two developments within psychoanalysis.  The first is that we have moved from focusing on the child’s role in the family drama – the murderous wishes that arise out of the Oedipal complex as something the child must work to resolve – to the parent’s part in that drama – our wish to murder our child (one way of reading David’s premonition dreams – as wishes rather than fears) as something that we must work to resolve.  The second is the parallel of moving from focusing only on the patient’s experience of the analysis to recognizing that there are two minds (and two unconscious processes) at work in the psychoanalytic relationship – and we need to understand the psychology of the analyst as well as that of the analysand to understand the interaction between them.

So, the central part of the story that is marginalized by the number of pages devoted to it (maybe 4 of 400 pages are devoted to it - OK, maybe 10, but not many) is the story of David’s relationship with his own parents – and with his mother in particular.  And the larger story hinges – and resolves – in this smaller story – one that could be summed up as the wish to connect – the wish that has driven David’s pursuit of Grace – being formed and resolved in the experience of having had his mother connect - or strive to connect - with him – and his desire to recreate that sense of connection – to achieve that sense of connection in his dreams – dreams that can only occur when we have built a basis in reality to support them.      

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