I started reading By Blood by Ellen Ullman on my road-trip and finished it up tonight. Ms. Ullman challenges us early on to suspend our disbelief with a premise that might seem overly contrived, but I bought in and was well rewarded with a somewhat creepy, very well-crafted novel about identity, history and psyche. A professor on some kind of questionable leave from a university rents an office in a building in San Francisco. It happens to be next door to a therapist. The therapist uses a white noise machine to fog voices in her office so nobody can hear sessions from outside, but one patient doesn’t like to use the noise machine. It happens that the professor has a long history of therapy himself. He’s a mess. The protagonist-patient is working through identity issues as the professor begins to listen through the walls, becoming obsessed with the patient. The therapist, like the professor, has a hidden history. OK, that’s the premise. If you can jump on that ship and go sailing, you’re going to love this book. It deals with identity, roots, adoption, family secrets, lesbian politics, even the Holocaust, and it does so with a story that is cleverly layered and interwoven and at times dark and twisted.

The story is revealed mostly through therapy sessions as heard through a wall. Parts reminded me of the wonderful HBO drama In Treatment, starring Gabriel Byrne as Dr. Paul Weston. The comparison only holds true on certain levels in that in both, we get to listen in, to witness therapy sessions, and as well, both share a very measured pace developed through the interaction of patient and therapist. The book offers the added complexity of a single very well-developed story-line, a therapist whose own history is uniquely pitted against the patient’s narrative, and the mysterious narrator who is obsessed with his own psychological difficulties and who has a long history of failed therapy.

Ellen Ullman is a novelist and also a computer programmer who has written numerous articles about technology. I never would have guessed that from reading this novel. In fact By Blood betrays a love for the English language I wouldn’t expect from someone whose background is writing code as much as sentences. I really enjoyed the use of language in this novel. I’m definitely going to track down her other works and put them on my reading list.