Marcel Malone by Lew Watts
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Beltway Neurotics

A cautionary chronicle of Yuppie suburban life in Washington, DC. He a lobbyist; she a psychotherapist, enjoying the best money can buy of the professional high-life. There is a name-dropping tour of the latest hip bistros with their selections of rare rums and ten course meals followed by candied strawberries. Their house in trendy Chevy Chase was purchased with daddy's money and their joint incomes only spur the desire for their increase to the next higher income-bracket.

The marriage is somewhat troubled, of course: he, obsessed by order and cleanliness, wants to get on in his career; she, catering to his demands resentfully, wants an intelligent conversation. The friends are banal professionals in places like the World Bank and similar international agencies who travel to less well-off places where they pontificate and negotiate lower prices for jewellery and art. Everyone drinks a bit too much but no one is watching very closely.

The protagonist psychotherapist-wife, Vera, 'makes a contribution' by addressing the neuroses of people unable to fill out a request for a new check book without help, or to date without stress. Her practice is punctuated by the occasional homicidal pedophile whom she dutifully turns over to the cops. When not with her clients, her mind moves from the issues of energy taxation to the poetry of Robert Frost with a facility and understanding enabled by her Georgetown education.

Vera's most important choices in life are what colour underwear to don and what gallery to visit between clients. She likes cracked crab and NPR. Who doesn't? The sex, of course is terrific, except when it isn't. She finds her solace in poetry about blossoming flowers. When her husband isn't selling or destroying new legislation, he watches baseball on the television. She can't tell a bunt from walk but adapts as required, primarily by obsessively speaking in iambic pentameter and ignoring his work for Big Coal.

Marcel is Vera's problematic but rewarding client. He writes her sonnets that report on his life between therapy sessions. She uses a range of apparently standard therapeutic techniques on Marcel - entrainment, paradoxical intervention, rapid-fire questioning - but, in good Jungian fashion, it's the writing and close reading of poetry that floats his boat. And it's the poetry that creates the breakthrough, for her as well as for Marcel.

There are secrets behind the middle-class facade that Vera's work with Marcel catalyses into awareness. Poetry, particularly the haikus she exchanges with Marcel, drown out sounds Vera would not like to hear. And it is poetry that also provokes her, under the veiled excuse of therapeutic necessity, to adopt an alternative persona and engage in online dating, "Just so I know what the experience is like." What could possibly go wrong?

For starters, clients die with uncomfortable frequency. And the therapist herself becomes more than a bit schizophrenic, deciding which persona to adopt with her husband, friends, surviving clients, and her random dates. On the plus side, Marcel has apparently had a breakthrough: his trauma was merely a misunderstanding, his father really had loved his mother after all. Everything tickety-boo on that front, therefore.

The skeletons in the therapist's closet eventually get revealed, however. Why they had to be revealed through an extensive discussion of the aesthetics of poetics is a mystery. Nabokov's Pale Fire is certainly better literature. Sylvia Plaith's Bell Jar is a much better demonstration of how poetry works in the psyche. And Ben Lerner's dope-soaked novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, actually does raise interesting questions about the connections between language and experience. Marcel Malone is puerile compared to any of these.

So, if Marcel Malone is meant to be a pragmatic justification of poetry as a sort of route to the inner self, it fails to make any significant connections between effective therapy and poetic skill. More likely, it seems, the author is someone who has discovered poetry as a sort of alternative universe to the sterile and false Beltway culture he realistically describes. If so, the book is merely trivial rather than inadequate. The poetry, in any case, seems as much a part of middle class pretentiousness as the trendy restaurants.

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