Picturing the Wreck

This is the story of Solomon Grossman, a Jewish psychoanalyst in his sixties who is looking back on a critical lapse some thirty years before when he gave in to the temptations of a beautiful female patient and crossed way over the professional doctor-patient line. The result of his mistake is loss of job, career (for a time), wife, and son. And self-respect. His life has been a mess ever since, and he is a conflicted mess of denial, self-loathing and loneliness, despite climbing back into the psychiatric world in New York. By a combination of flashbacks and present day narration, we witness Solomon making an ill-timed entrance back into his son's life. Sadly, the son, from whom he was separated at the son's infancy, has also made a successful mess of his life. What follows are some tender moments of father-son reunion and a measure of reconciliation. This part felt a little rushed and contrived, with the son's transformation from estrangement to intimacy seeming to play out in just a day or two. Perhaps that is possible, but there was something a little inauthentic about it. I did like the book and admired that the writer was able to make "action" play second fiddle to the emotional development of the characters. Not a great work, but still one to be appreciated.

Dani Shapiro fuses personal isolation and professional catastrophy in her contemplative, nuanced "Picturing the Wreck." Her novel focuses on Solomon Grossman, an escapee from the Holocaust, whose adult life reflects emotional wreckage and extreme isolation. A psychotherapist, Grossman committed the cardinal sin of having sexual contact with one of his patients, and that pivotal moment ruined his marriage and removed his one-year-old son from his life. Now, some thirty years later, Grossman seeks reconnection, not only with his absent son, Daniel, but with his own soul.Shapiro tightly interweaves present and past in "Wreck," and her unsentimental, spare style encourages identification with Solomon while eliciting sympathy with Daniel. Never at peace with himself about his past actions and constantly numbed by the withering impact of Holocaust loss, Solomon has reconstructed his professional life after his loss of job and respect but has never overcome the emptiness engenedered by self-reproach. The strength of the novel is its involvement with the internal life of Solomon; its weakness is a contrived and mawkish conclusion.Any parent who has suffered either spiritual or physical separation from a beloved child will respond to Solomon's perpetual sadness. Nothing can abate his ever-present sense of failure and loss. Sequestered in a tightly-controlled environment (he even alphabatizes the books in his psychology library), his days given to "curing" others, Solomon receives little satisfaction and even less solace from his profession. In fact, therapy mocks his own failure and flaws. This intelligent, broken man even lacks the energy and courage to seek out his son, instead discovering him on a television news broadcast.Shapiro handles the eventual reunion and subsequnet rediscovery of father and son with care. Ironically, it is the son who bestows upon the father the blessing of love and connection. Despite years of anticipation and emotional preparation, Solomon is unprepared for the impact of reconnection. Daniel is dealing with his own wreckage...a failed marriage and a life of existential wandering, and his realizations that he has a father, that his father is alive and that his father has loved him are deeply moving. However, Shapiro seems not to know what to do next, and her decision as to the disposition of each character saps "Wreck" of its intial hard-edged strength.

The only thing bad about this book is it is too short. It seems that just as the story starts to pull together it is over...unfortunately this is how life is as it is protrayed in this book. The main character is a complex sympathetic lecharous holocaust victim who cherished the year he had with his son until his wife left him. Thirty years later he sees his son on a television news report and rushes cross country to meet his son. I don't want to give away the book but I will tell you that their reunion is bittersweet.