Our narrator, a professor on leave from his university, takes an office in an aging, once-grand, old building in downtown San Francisco. It’s late summer, 1974. San Francisco thrums along despite an undercurrent of chaos and fear. The Zodiac Killer still prowls Northern California, the economy is stagnant all over the United States, and kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst dominates the headlines. The professor plans to prepare a series of lectures on Aeschylus’ play, The Eumenides, in his newly acquired work space. Like the protagonist in the Greek tragedy, the professor is pursued, by his own demons rather than the vengeful Furies of the play. We soon learn the professor’s leave is involuntary; he has fled at least part way across the country to avoid confronting the aftermath of some vaguely defined wrongdoing. The misdeed, the investigation, and the flight induce the latest episode of what the professor terms his “nervous condition”. The professor rented the office to add routine to his life and give himself a reason to leave his rented, shabby beachfront house. It’s a rocky beginning: ”The dark emotions seemed to be part of my body, instinctual, issuing from the cells as surely as saliva or blood or urine, and with as little conscious opportunity to intervene in their production.”
Within a month, his routine is more or less established and he writes the first workable notes for his lecture. The building is quiet. It calms him. Then one morning as he works, he notices the acoustics of his office changed. White noise emanates from the space next door. Just above the electronic din, he hears distinct sounds he recognizes as indistinct conversation. As he listens, irritated at the interruption, the noise stops. Two female voices drift through the slightest of doors between the offices. Captivated by the voice of the patient in the psychotherapist’s chair, he begins eavesdropping in earnest, taking great pains to remain inaudible as well as invisible.
Soon his life revolves around the appointments of his “dear patient”. He overhears her concerns, her troubles. Problems at home with her girlfriend, varying from squabbles about housekeeping to fundamental differences in their views of lesbian politics. But the problem that fascinates him most is her adoption, what the patient refers to as her “mysterious origins”. The patient describes a little girl, just a baby, she once encountered in a foundling hospital:
“Born unhappy. Built in. Original, like sin. In her bones and blood and skin. And nothing would ever change that verdict. She was going to have a hard time in this world. I looked at that little baby — she was still screaming; why didn’t somebody soothe her now, for God’s sake? — and I wondered: What would I have done? How deep and dark and terrible that cylinder must have seemed. Would I have been able to do it: reach in and find the shiny little happiness at the bottom?”
The therapist, believing the patient recreates unhealthy romances based on her relationship with her adoptive mother, encourages and even pushes the patient to explore her adoption and the reasons for the secrecy surrounding her birth. Unknowingly, the therapist sets in motion events that dredge up decades-old secrets that reach around the globe, encompassing Germany after the fall of Hitler, the establishment of the Israeli state, and the role of the Catholic Church in safeguarding the Jewish children of post-war Europe.
Ellen Ullman’s story drips with literary allusions and brims with redolent, enthralling language, creating a shifting, slightly Gothic, and richly layered tale of a man’s obsession with, and interference in, a young woman’s search for her genetic origins. The patient unwittingly takes on the role of the professor’s surrogate. By experiencing her therapy, anonymously funneling information about her adoption, and living vicariously through her, he hopes to find a parallel peace for himself. The intimacy of the voyeuristic relationship is, of course, one-sided; the creation and delusion of an obsessive man. Both truth and lies emerge as the patient follows her biological family tree. In the end, we are left to decide the importance of identity, genetics, and family just as the patient will: for ourselves.