Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind

Starred review from May 4, 2015
The staid, cultured milieu of Upper West Side psychoanalysts and their clients gets an insightful and penetrating treatment from Roiphe (a National Book Award finalist for Fruitful) in this lyrical, meditative novel. The analystsâincluding elderly Dr. Estelle Berman and her middle-aged colleagues Dr. H. and Dr. Z.âtake on a range of patients: young movie star Justine, a kleptomaniac whose real name is Betty; Anna, a self-harming college dropout; Mike, a 72-year-old widower whose son Ivan "had done something ungodly" and then fled the country. The doctors' professional and personal lives are difficult to separate. Dr. H. discovers a disguised Ivan while vacationing with his family in Belize; a very young analyst becomes obsessed with a colleague; and Edith, a "frightfully huge" poet, finally develops the courage to show Dr. Berman her work. Little by little, the aging Dr. Berman, who "considered herself a kind of exterminator... after the lice of the mind," begins to mentally deteriorate, and the damage she ultimately wreaks on the lives of Edith and her own relatives can't be mediated through psychiatry. Roiphe's accomplishment is to humanize, in sensitive prose, the men and women who would help others regain their own humanity. Readers are invited into the mysterious space beyond the consulting room, filled with spouses and children, "a lot of normal failing," and "the bravery of loving or hating or wishing."

Starred review from May 15, 2015
The ways in which dementia impacts the lives of its victims are legion and legendary, but when the patient is a noted Manhattan psychoanalyst, the diagnosis is fraught with unintended consequences. Marginally in denial to herself but totally secretive when it comes to her colleagues and patients, Dr. Estelle Berman manages her patients' problems much more successfully than her own; patients such as the hot young movie star with a penchant for paparazzi-attracting bad behavior, or the morbidly obese poet who trusts her with her slim volumes of poetry. Occasionally, as her condition warrants, Dr. Berman must refer a patient to an associate, either Dr. H or Dr. Z, whose wry, schadenfreude-filled commentary on her acumen and activities becomes less glib when their own lives and practices suffer upsets. A novelist and essayist renowned for her feminist insights, Roiphe (Art and Madness, 2011) eloquently explores the full panoply of human emotions, motivations, and frustrations through the rarefied world of those whose job it is to decipher such human behavior. It is said that the unexamined life is not worth living. With prose that is both achingly beautiful and astonishingly wise, Roiphe demonstrates a keen and cunning passion for just such examinations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)