Ann Beattie can be as funny, or as mordantly funny, as she is fatalistic. No comedy, The Doctor’s House still has its share of humor, most of it inherent in the setting. The Cambridge (Massachusetts) of this novel is an overcrowded place where midlife crises " are as common as colds " and inhabitants consult their shrinks about everything. " It’s the Cambridge way, " one character quips. One typical guy moves to town after his wife divorces him for spending the summers sailing. Filmmakers write their own perfect reviews and hand them out at Brattle Theatre screenings. One woman surmises that landing an Arlington condo " was what middle-aged excitement had come to. " Above all, Cambridge, like New York, is a place where it’s easy to disappear.
Nina, a reclusive copy editor, all but laughs when an older woman asks her whether it’s exciting living in Cambridge. Nina explains that " it was a place — like San Francisco, like Paris — you couldn’t disabuse people of romanticizing, because it had a charming façade that made it seem at once open, yet mysteriously remote. " She muses that Cambridge exists in a sort of perpetual time warp. We learn about Nina and her family in three separate narratives told in sequence by Nina, by her obtuse mother, and by her conniving brother — all of whom are stuck in a family trauma and struggling to escape.
Nina’s brother, Andrew, is a womanizing computer wiz who lives nearby. He counts on Nina’s sympathy as he presses upon her the details of his romantic debacles. Nina, who’s still mourning her young physician husband’s death, lives vicariously through Andrew. One night, after a pleasant, unexpected dinner date with an ad exec, she realizes she has to escape her brother because he’s suffocating her.
Unlike the brother and sister in Kenneth Lonergan’s film You Can Count on Me, who meet intermittently and reaffirm each other, needy and overwhelming Andrew and passive and enabling Nina threaten to cancel each other out. Childhood survival strategies carried into adulthood now sabotage them. Instead of growing up alone, like the Lonergan duo, Nina and Andrew endured abusive parents: an alcoholic mother and a philandering yet stern, puritanical father. When they tell a friend one story from their childhood, the friend reacts, says Andrew, " as if we were telling him about life on another planet, a planet where all atmospheric gases were lethal. "
The parents are a real piece of work, especially father Frank, or Dr. X, as Nina thinks of him. Frank treats his wife and children with hostility and neglect when not seducing his office nurse, female patients, and women in the community. His wife, who’s dependent on Scotch and TV sit-coms, doesn’t want to know anything.
" The Doctor, " as Frank refers to himself, is given to crazed, midnight interrogations of his kids after minor infractions. Beattie, in a significant narrative shift, makes you suffer along with the characters, in explicit, ugly scenes of family trauma that were only hinted at in her previous work. Gone are the drifting, dissociated individuals reacting to phantom pain — here, adult siblings recall specific parental confrontations and reverberating psychic violence. You wonder whether Nina and Andrew can keep from turning into their parents.
The most grueling scenes, told in flashback, see the tyrannical father interfering in the siblings’ adolescence. Fifteen-year-old Andrew is humiliated when Frank discovers him in a tryst with two neighborhood girls. It becomes clear that the grown-up Andrew’s compulsive pursuit of women is an attempt to prove he’s alive.
Even as you register the discrepancies in the overlapping first-person narratives, you’re apt to be persuaded by the individual dissembling voices. The book uncannily mimics the way we make up our stories in order to survive. At the end, Andrew has a split-second premonitory vision that heightens and then halts the momentum of the novel in a startling climax.
This is an essential Ann Beattie story with a darker, sharper focus. You’re still driving in Beattie territory, and the characters are recognizable, but their stories take turns you might not have anticipated. The Doctor’s House is a Beattie breakthrough — think of it as solving the mystery story at the heart of much of her work.
