The Behavior of Love

March 4, 2019
Reeves (Work Like Any Other) forms an intense love triangle between a doctor, his wife, and one of his patients across the 1970s and ’80s in her introspective latest. Psychologist Ed Malinowski recently moved to Montana to oversee the Boulder River School and Hospital, a chronically underfunded and understaffed mental institution. In order to quell his wife Laura’s fears about his long sessions with, and not entirely professional praise for, his 16-year-old epileptic patient Penelope, Ed encourages Laura to come to the institution to teach art once a week. The plan backfires and Laura grows more weary of Ed’s denials. In an effort to save his marriage, Ed releases Penelope to her parents as a shining example of his sweeping deinstitutionalization plans that are criticized by state officials and family members of the institutionalized. Soon, Laura is pregnant, but Ed misses the early birth of their son when he rushes to visit Penelope in the hospital after she abruptly stops her seizure medications. Things quickly fall apart for the characters—an unmoored Ed drifts through a period of womanizing and heavy drinking, until a medical crisis brings all three together in unexpected, difficult ways. Readers who enjoy complex depictions of the lingering commitments of relationships will be swept away by Reeves’s crisp, powerful novel.

February 15, 2019
A marriage falls apart in 1970s Montana.Laura is angry. Her husband, Ed, a behavioral psychiatrist, has taken a position as superintendent of a mental institution in Boulder, Montana, forcing their move from Michigan, where she was pursuing her career as an artist. She is angry, too, because he works all the time; she feels ignored; and, worse, he is obsessed with one patient, Penelope, a beautiful, intelligent 16-year-old epileptic. Angry, jealous wife; workaholic, sexually voracious husband; tempting young woman: Reeves (Work Like Any Other, 2016) plays out this well-worn triangle in chapters that shift between Laura's first-person narration and a third-person narration that's close to Ed's perspective, arriving at a twist that finally moves the novel beyond cliché to become a sensitive examination of love, responsibility, and compassion. Ed, who frequents prostitutes for "simple pleasures and anonymity," is stereotypically self-absorbed. Laura espouses a familiar plaint, tearfully admitting to feeling "lonely and trapped and so angry and then so sad, and he couldn't see that I was disappearing, that I needed him." Struggling to define herself, she secretly takes a job at a clothing boutique; when she becomes pregnant, she keeps that a secret, too, for four months. "Why the hell did it take you so long to notice?" she asks angrily when Ed finally does notice, as they are having sex in a locked classroom at the hospital. Trying to make Laura feel validated, Ed convinces her to teach art to some patients--and against her objections insists that Penelope take the class. Predictably, the girl proves to be impressively talented, producing, Laura sees, "an artist's sketch, as good as anything I could do," and intensifying her jealousy. Ed, innovating a policy of deinstitutionalizing high-functioning patients, sends Penelope back to her disgruntled parents, precipitating a crisis that changes his life and her own. The biggest change, though, is Ed's fate, forcing the man who has only observed suffering to find himself--and Laura--at its vortex.A predictable plot reveals emotional complexities.

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March 1, 2019
Superintendent of a blighted-but-improving Montana mental institution, behavioral-psychiatrist Ed works long hours with few resources, but he finds a bright spot in private sessions with epileptic teenager Penelope, who doesn't really belong there. Ed seems to think that if he talks about Pen enough, especially with his artist wife, Laura, he must not be hiding anything. Besides, while Pen is bright and beautiful, she's his young patient, and Ed loves sexy, independent Laura. Just how independent she is is revealed when Laura, fed up, stuns Ed by leaving him. Set in the early 1970s, Reeves' (Work like Any Other, 2016) second novel finds focus with this rupture, which doesn't so much end Ed and Laura's relationship as set it on a new path. Later, illness rebalances the scales all over again. Perceptive-doctor Ed understands his own feelings least, while Laura more comfortably stares down the difference between what love looks like and what it is. Enhanced by its particular time and place, this unique and uniquely compelling novel explores love, marriage, health, and agency in shifting phases.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)