The Listener

Set in a Long Island psychiatric hospital after WWII, this story has all the elements of a gothic thriller: an opium-smoking psychiatrist, a mysterious patient obsessed with a war-criminal brother, unethical German scientists, and an alluring night nurse with an erotic secret. Yet something holds the production back. It's not clear whether it's Nayman's overuse of sensual, and occasionally flowery, language or Jefferson Mays's tone, which seesaws between that of "Masterpiece Theater" and that of "Dark Shadows." It's an enjoyable, sometimes campy, story. But this may be one of those books that's more enjoyable to hold in your hands than to plug into your ears on a stormy night. R.W.S. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

September 7, 2009
A psychiatrist turns out to be his own most difficult case in this slackly plotted first novel from Nayman (after the collection Awake in the Dark
). In 1947, Dr. Henry Harrison, the director of the New York City–area insane asylum Shadowbrook, begins treating Bertram Reiner, a German-born biochemistry Ph.D. who fought for the U.S. during WWII and claims to have committed himself to hide from his brother, a former Nazi. Shortly after receiving a letter claiming to be from Bertram's brother's wife, Henry sees a trespasser on the Shadowbrook grounds and begins to think Bertram might be telling the truth. Henry is also struggling with his own ghosts: he's haunted by the memory of a young female patient whose tragic death caused Henry to start using opium; his marriage is failing; and he's increasingly attracted to a nurse. Nayman plumbs the murky ethics of the analyst-patient relationship and tackles moral questions of collaboration and guilt, but her story struggles beneath a mountain of metaphysical weight. Meanwhile, philosophical allusions pile up as increasingly implausible plot twists and awkwardly timed flashbacks prevent this novel from becoming the psychological thriller it aspires to be.