Shrinking

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

AUGUST by Judith Rossner

Houghton Mifflin; 376 pages; $15.95

In her new novel, Judith Rossner (Looking for Mr. Goodbar) returns to a favorite theme: the frantic search for emotional connection. The New York City landscape of August is littered with suicides, failed marriages, estranged children and an assortment of ambivalent sexual identities. The one successful relationship is built between two women: Dawn Henley, 18 at the outset, an orphaned college student, and Dr. Lulu Shinefeld, her fortyish psychoanalyst. In classic Freudian fashion, the patient seeks a surrogate parent. The analyst, a divorcee and failed mother, comes to view her patient as a surrogate daughter. Each woman uses the analytic relationship to relive, and make up for, errors that were made in their other lives outside the room with the couch. Ironically but somehow predictably, as Dawn slowly improves, her analyst regresses.

The title refers to the month when, in Ressner's flippant vision, all the analysts go on vacation, leaving their patients to fret or go crazy. The story is a cycle of summer deaths and September rebirths of the therapeutic relationship. August is also a kind of wish fulfillment for patients who want to be the only person in the doctor's life yet long to find out where the analyst goes when the 50-minute hour is over.

Dr. Shinefeld, her ex-husband, her friends and her feckless, casually cruel lover are all analysts, occupying a narrow world whose poles are the brownstones bordering Central Park and the beaches of the Hamptons. The doctor is preoccupied by a frequently tedious midlife crisis that seems trifling and ill motivated by comparison with the traumas of her benumbed patient. Dawn was born to a catatonic, who committed suicide when her child was an infant, and a male homosexual, who died in a boating accident a year later. She has been raised by a leathery lesbian aunt and her feminine girlfriend, whom the child called Daddy and Mommy. (To aggravate matters, Dawn switched those names around as a schoolgirl after learning that mommies stayed home like her aunt and daddies worked like the girlfriend.) Though any first-year psych major could offer a working hypothesis of what went wrong, Dawn and Lulu spend endless sessions on the long search for revelation. The ideology of the trek is Freudian, yet its contrived sexual oddities are not plumbed for meaning; they are treated as ordinary, which has a preachy effect of consciousness raising.

En route, Rossner tosses off a number of saline one-liners ("Women looked at a gray-haired man and saw Father; men looked at a gray-haired woman and ran from death"). But August has two profound flaws. The narrative, which starts out like a detective story, is a tease: Dawn never arrives at a stunning moment of self-realization; instead, the treatment just winds down haphazardly and stops. Worse, Rossner cannot seem to decide what kind of book she is writing. At moments she appears to strive for the heartfelt tone of Judith Guest in Ordinary People; a few sentences later she lurches into smug social satire reminiscent of Fran Lebowitz's Metropolitan Life.

Many of the characters are shrewdly if harshly drawn stereotypes. Only Dawn is wholly likable, and her situation is so extreme that the reader pays a credulity tax with almost every chapter. Dr. Shinefeld, effective as a therapist, is a lulu of a loser as a woman. Ressner's treatment suggests that what another writer called the Impossible Profession is still beyond easy analysis. --By William A. Henry III This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.