Fine

by Samuel Shem

With the same brilliant meld of zany humor, human emotion, and high truth that made his first novel, The House of God, a medical classic, Samuel Shem, himself a psychiatrist, plunges headlong into the world of contemporary psychoanalysis, bringing to it all the same passion, comedy, and probing intent. In Fine we see psychoanalysis fifty years after Freud, its bizarre rigidity, its potential greatness. A rich, many-leveled tale told with Shem's magical mix of the serious and the hilarious, Fine is an erotic love story ("all love stories are about three people"); a murder mystery (who is killing the shrinks of Boston?); a novel of modern relationships; and a tale of awesome self-discovery. In short, it is about life.In the short, plump, ebullient Fine, the author has created one of the most endearing and most surprising heroes in fiction. We love him in his joys and his delusions, his pain, his self-aggrandizement, at his heights of achievement and his falls from grace. Tumultuous, merry, blindly enthusiastic Dr. Fine—just out of Harvard Med—believes everything is his love for his wise-cracking fiancée Stephanie; their close friendship with the budding actor John James Michael O'Day, Jr.; his future scientific career as the grand synthesizer of biology and psychology. Suddenly eager to find out how people change, he startles everyone on graduation day by announcing the start of his own analysis, in preparation for becoming a "shrink."Seven years later—now a "perfectly analyzed human being"—this wonderfully open fellow has been transmogrified. Slimmed down, trussed up in his three-piece suit, straight-faced (jokes are aggressive), poor Fine is unaware that his marriage is failing (even Stephanie "Why are you analysts so weird?!"); he's lost his friends; he's separated from the world by a two-second psychoanalytic tape delay.It takes the most extreme human dramas—being challenged by his patients, haunted by a murderer, deserted by his wife for a career as a stand-up comic, dealing with illness and infidelity—to shake him to the core. Only then does Fine realize how far he has fallen, how far he still has to journey to open up again, to become a husband, a friend, a true therapist, and, finally, a human being.

Genres: Fiction, Roman

381 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Samuel Shem (b. 1944) is the pen name of the American psychiatrist Stephen Joseph Bergman. His main works are The House of God and Mount Misery, both fictional but close-to-real first-hand descriptions of the training of doctors in the United States.
Of Jewish descent, Bergman was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford in 1966, and was tutored by Denis Noble FRS, cardiac physiologist and later head of the Oxford Cardiac Electrophysiology Group. In an address to Noble's retirement party at Balliol, he related that Noble's response to Bergman's attempt to become a writer was to ply him with copious sherry. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School.
He was an intern at Beth Israel Hospital (subsequently renamed Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) ,which inspired the book The House of God.
As of 2017, Bergman is a member of the faculty of the New York University School of Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center.
Shem's play Bill W. and Dr. Bob had an Off Broadway run at New World Stage in New York City. It ran for 132 performances and closed on June 10, 2007. The New York Times called it "an insightful new play."

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

Waste of Time

Read this year's ago along with House of God and Mount Misery. Recently read all 3 again thinking they were good from before. Can't imagine what made me think any of them were good thread the first time around let alone a second time. Don't bother!