Such a microscopic vision of a psychologist at work is a revelation, especially since the whole novel is set inside the analyst’s head. Referred to throughout simply as “the good psychologist,’’ our protagonist is a nameless narrator, a conceit both irritating, yet also excusable as a device to keep us at a distance and to underscore a trained professional’s necessary detachment.
Despite the therapist’s cultivated blank face and measured tone, we chip away at the surface to dislodge tiny nuggets of his character the same way he gets his patients to open up once he wins their trust. But he’s hard to know. Nondescript, methodical, he lives alone in a small but pleasant apartment, which he keeps “deliberately dark.” His street is quiet. He’s lonely. He treats patients at the Center for Anxiety Disorders between 10 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon; he teaches an evening class at the local college. Though he has no sexual partner, he yearns for Nina, a colleague married to an ill husband, and whose child he has fathered at her request but has never met. “So what am I to you?” [Nina asks.] “It is being investigated. We’re examining it,” [he answers].
A serial interpreter, the psychologist examines and investigates everything. An impatient commuter honking as a traffic light changes is tolerated because “the context, the situation determines our actions.” T-shirts, bumper stickers, tattoos “are rooted in an attempt . . . to escape a kind of annihilating anonymity.”
In the novel’s alternating chapters, the good psychologist struggles with his relationship — or lack of one — with Nina, teaches his inspiring night classes, and holds therapy sessions with a new client, an exotic dancer named Tiffany who has developed crippling stage fright. When Tiffany asks whether he can help her, he replies “I can support you in the process where you learn to help yourself.”
