Thrity Umrigar’s novel about the relationship between a psychotherapist and her client shows the therapist breaking many ethical rules of her profession, including employing the client as a house cleaner and caterer.  It is for the client’s own benefit, and it helps.  It’s no revelation that therapists break rules, but it is implausible that a therapist would make such crass errors and also tell her friends about them.  Maggie is a knowledgeable and talented clinician, and being African American from Brooklyn, she brings very important life experience to her work.  She is also married to an Indian man, a Math professor, and so she is familiar with some aspects of Indian culture. Her client Lakshimi is an Indian woman; she came to the United States to be married to her Indian husband, who emigrated from India many years before her. She has secrets from her life in India which slowly get revealed through the novel, and she starts her therapy feeling despair because she has so little control of her life and so little hope.  The novel is strong in showing the contrast between the world of a poor unlucky family in India and a successful professional in North America. But the central weakness of the book is having Lakshimi narrate her own story in broken English, which gets tiresome quickly.  The unabridged audiobook performed by Sneha Mathan copes well with this quirk, providing an clear Indian accent for Lakshimi, but it does not stop Lakshimi from becoming a rather clownish character because of her funny turns of phrase.  The other main disappointment of the novel is that it says so little about psychology for a book with a therapist as its main character. We get no indication of how Maggie goes about her job as therapist, what her beliefs are, or what drives her own neuroses.  We are left with a dramatic but implausible story.

© 2014 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York