We met psychiatric resident Zoe Goldman in Block’s first novel, Little Black Lies. She has the same issues as before: she suffers from anxiety and problems with attention. She tries to deal with these by medicating them, although her own psychiatrist suggests that the recent escalation of the symptoms may be tied to Zoe’s grief for her mother, who died recently. So there’s a different of approach between them, and of course it turns out that Zoe does need to grieve.  She tends to a biological approach, but this gets her approval in her training. At the same time, she cares for her patients, and wants to help them.  This leads her to get involved in some of their lives, especially when their problems are related to their vulnerable positions in life.

In this novel, Zoe is working on a rotation for mentally ill adolescents. She has cases of drug addiction, eating disorders, and plenty of others.  One case particularly bothers, of a young African-American girl who will not say anything.  She isn’t sure how to deal with the case, which doesn’t resolve itselve quickly, but she has a supervising psychiatrist who has much more experience than her, and he is firm in his guidance but is at first willing to hear her suggestions.  The case gets more and more complicated, and as in the previous novel, the plot ends up trading in cliché.

The back plots about Zoe’s brother and her relationship with her boyfriend provide some detail and depth, although they are not particularly gripping. The appealing aspect of The Girl without a Name is the detail of the treatments of different patients and the depiction of the experience of working daily on a psychiatric ward and the debate between experts about possible explanations of symptoms and possible solutions.  These are realistic and interesting. The story of the girl with no name is also pretty well done as the psychiatrists debate over her problems and as Zoe risks her position to defend her views.

Since there are few novels set in psychiatric wards, this book will appeal a good deal to those in mental health who are seeking for a modern depiction of their discipline.

© 2015 Christian Perring

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