Random House
Review by Walter Cummins
This case is indeed strange as it is revealed by through the voices of the two people at the center of the complication—Dr. Henry Byrd, the psychoanalyst driven to solve the mental mystery, and Jane O., who manifests the oddities that divide her life into orderly functioning—what Dr. Byrd calls an obsession for exactitude—and actions that violate the notion of order. It’s important to acknowledge that Jane’s order is distinct from that of other people. She completes the steps of holding a job, raising an infant, and caring for an apartment, but is isolated from other humans and unable to connect events of her past to happenings of her present. Dr. Byrd names her condition “a loneliness of the soul.”
Dr. Byrd, for much of the novel, reports what he is learning about Jane’s circumstances and, with growing concern, the nature of their relationship—why she chose him out of all the analysts in New York and why her interactions with him go through differing phases. He wants her to integrate her activities into a coherent pattern.
As Jane is so much of a mystery in her behavior, unwilling or unable to reveal, Dr. Byrd deliberately holds back from his reader as he would from a patient in analysis. For example, he states that he has a daughter and that she has no mother. The reason why doesn’t come until deep in the novel, nor do the events that led to his loss of an university office and other sources of certain professional difficulties. Early in the novel, he reveals, “I had left my previous job under difficult circumstances and for reasons that lie outside the scope of this narrative.” Yet as the story develops, those circumstances come to lie at the heart of his analysis of Jane.
When all that about Dr. Byrd emerges—the consequences of the events of his life—it comes out that he too is a strange case. The reason he was dismissed from a research position at a university was his abandonment of the assigned topic and, instead, devoting all his time and funding to a personal theory of precognition. What happened was that alone in his apartment with his newborn daughter, he was overcome with feelings of doom shortly before receiving a call that his wife had been hit and killed by a delivery truck. After that he fixated on studying the validity of precognition. Later he applies that possibility to what was happening to Jane. Even though his theories about human behavior that he thinks may be germane to Jane are rejected by her, they become more vital to him.
The reason for the oddities of her present behavior that others observe but that Jane has no idea is taking place is attributed to a form of dissociative fugue by Dr. Byrd: “a form of amnesia in which a person loses awareness of their identity and all personal memories.” The first example in the novel is the reason it is decided Jane needs therapy after she is discovered unconscious after twenty-five hours under a tree in a park. For the second she spends nine days in an empty Upper East Side apartment with her one-year-old son, finally using the phone there to call Dr. Byrd. It turns out that that apartment was the site of an event central to her life twenty years before. In the third fugue, she is hospitalized for days, weak and bedridden, suffering a seizure, and confused by hallucinations. During this period, Dr. Byrd is overtaken by dreams of his dead wife in which he communicates with her through Jane’s visions.
When Jane returns to her daily life as if nothing significant has taken place, she dismisses the gravity of her condition, minimizing her problem. It is Dr. Byrd who obsesses over his need to grasp her condition, unable to end their relationship because, ethically, he knows what had started as a professional puzzle has grown to an emotional involvement that violates his professional standards. He knows they must stop their interaction.
My initial reaction to the novel’s ending as told through Jane’s perspective was one of disappointment. When they meet in Prospect Park, Jane admits she shares his feelings as he attempts to explain why continuing to be with her would be wrong. Watching his back as he walks away, she feels a “terrible emptiness.” That seems to be the conclusion of the novel. Yet the story, though Jane’s telling, offers an alternative ending: “Everything could have happened in a different way. But how it did happen was this.” Dr. Byrd, she tells, instead of leaving, touches her for the first time, and with him holding her hand tight, they leave the bench together.
Such a scene I first regarded as a sentimental mistake, inappropriate for both their characters, especially given Jane’s psychological dilemma. Then I thought of yet another alternative ending—that she has been overtaken by one more fantasy, not cured, but lost to a delusion of an imaginary Henry Byrd.
That wouldn’t be the first such mistake made by Jane. Even though her memory had impressed Dr. Byrd for its thorough retention of details, earlier in the novel he had accepted her story of discovering the body of a woman in a nearby apartment, something that a police officer tells Byrd never happened, the woman she named a person Byrd eventually meets. Does Jane invent memories resulting from her fugue? When Jane sees this woman, she rejects it as a fantasy.
Or another type of explanation. Dr. Byrd posits that, “But some fields of science are composed almost entirely of the seemingly unbelievable. Take the unproven concept in astrophysics of dark energy … that it might account for two-thirds of the entire universe.” He shifts to defending a dismissed 1960s example by a theorist of precognition: “But what if those false visions, I now wonder, were triggered by real events that struck not here but somewhere parallel?” Has Jane given us multiple endings in parallel universes?
