Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Another of Burnet’s faux-biographical-research stories in the vein of His Bloody Project. He’s good enough at these that you may end up googling some of the characters to see if they existed… some did, some didn’t. (Susanna Clarke pulls off something similar in her Piranesi, with which this one has some similarities, and which I liked a lot.) This one comprises a series of journal-type notebooks, kept by a young woman who believes that a controversial, egotistical blowhard of a therapist (or “untherapist”) has driven her sister to suicide. Taking on an assumed (or is it?) identity, she presents herself as a patient / client (though he prefers the term “visitor”) of A. Collins Braithwaite, to observe and engage with him and perhaps find out just what went on between him and her sister. Interspersed with the notebooks are passages from a biography of Braithwaite by someone with the initials GMB, which generally depicts an era of turmoil, bombast, rebellion and reaction in the field of psychiatry in 1960’s London, including the work of R.D. Laing (who did in fact exist). Braithwaite is both an acolyte and a furious rebel, not to mention pretty repulsive (I kept picturing him as Steve Bannon). Spoiler: we never do really find out what happened to the sister, except to the extent that we see Braithwaite responding to someone with suicidal thoughts with “Well, what’s stopping you?” Mostly, this story tangles with the idea of “self” (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) – contradictory, overlapping selves, whose delusions, perceptions, and actions should (in Braithwaite and Laing’s thought) be observed and taken seriously as a true expression of their reality and not simply exterminated by insulin comas, lobotomies, or electroshock. And surprisingly, this is actually all rather fun to read as our young journal-keeper fences with Braithwaite, but also slides deeper into her own conflicted “selves.”
I round this down to 3 stars because the ending – as others have reported – just rather peters out. The “author” eventually meets the reclusive individual (a “cousin” of the young journal-keeper) who had given him his entrĂ©e to this story, with an unsurprising revelation. Braithwaite has a change of heart and behavior – which does him little good. And the sense of “Swinging London” in the 1960s is very much in the background and not particularly vivid. But still – an interesting, crafty, and skillful interweaving of story, character, identity and ideas that made it a clever and enjoyable read.
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