In one of his most wittily morbid lyrics, Leonard Cohen reflected on medicine’s inability to treat a particular function of the body and mind: “The doctors working day and night / But they’ll never ever find that cure for love.” In Virginia Reeves’s second novel, Dr Ed Malinowski, a behavioural psychologist in Montana in the early 1970s, is stricken with life-threatening desire while attempting a sort of cure through love. The recipient of his intense (although, he tells himself, platonic) attention is a 16-year-old girl, Penelope Gatson, a patient at Boulder River School and Hospital in Colorado, where the physician fondly known as “Dr Ed” works with the “developmentally disabled”. Most of the inmates have severe learning difficulties, but Penelope is a near-genius, detained due to severe epilepsy, which back then was often treated through institutionalisation.
The enlightened doctor believes that the teenager might be returned to live and work in the community through “behavioural modifications”. As the major change in Penelope’s regime involves Dr Ed staying ever later at the institution to monitor her, this puts pressure on the 36-year-old’s marriage to Laura, an underachieving painter who moved reluctantly to the Rockies.
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