Therapy

by Steven Schwartz

Schwartz's storytelling gifts draw the reader achingly close to the characters, as their lives crisscross in and out of therapy. With humor and compassion, this deeply affecting novel shows that everyday life is often the true struggle and the ultimate triumph. "A quiet celebration of the miraculous and the mundane."--Chicago Tribune.

Genres: Fiction, Mental Illness

Paperback

First published June 17, 1994

About the author

Steven Schwartz is the author of four story collections To Leningrad in Winter (University of Missouri), Lives of the Fathers (University of Illinois), Little Raw Souls (Autumn House), Madagascar: New and Selected Stories and two novels, Therapy(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and A Good Doctor’s Son (William Morrow). His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, the Cohen Award, the Colorado Book Award for the Novel, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Bread Loaf. He has taught in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and the MFA program at Colorado State University, where he serves as fiction editor for the Colorado Review. His latest novel is The Tenderest of Strings from Regal House.

Reviews

[Tracy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. A good book that gets inside the head of therapists. Terrible ending, however. It's like he just decided he was done and threw an ending down without a lot of thought.

[Dana Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's actually a 3.75. I so wanted to give it a 4, but couldn't.

[Sue Kozlowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel. Couldn't put it down. Cop and wife, Wallis and baby Claude. Psychiatrist has a patient Julian who kills himself so he quits his job. Hard to tell what the "moral" is.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author raises the questions that anybody who has chosen therapy or is considering to do so asks themselves: what is the benefit? Is it social support if organizing your day and getting ready to go somewhere, is it having someone to listen to your thoughts, is it to try to manage the symptoms, is it uncover the source? With so many approaches within the psychological school of thought the outcome and therefore the process might be considerably different depending on who you reach out to.

The book describes everyday mechanics of interactions as well as differences in perception of those interactions. Like water on a waterwheel those become the driving force moving the characters along. Just like water, there are splashes that subside just as quickly as they start and, while capturing our attention by the loudness if the event, dont change the bigger picture.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of therapy details in this book. Not much of a storyline....Not sure if there was a point to the story or not. Maybe I just missed it

[Emilie · Rating 3 out of 5]

would’ve been a 4/5 but the ending really felt unfinished