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.
With these central characters, Reeves, whose rural 1920s-set debut Work Like Any Other was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker prize, efficiently sets up a psychological triangle that suggests two cars speeding in opposite directions towards someone crossing a road. There must be minimal chance of the vehicles and the walker avoiding each other, but the story cleverly keeps us guessing about precisely who, in the ultimate collision, will be dangerously driving or simply moving too late to get out of the way.
Some ominous establishing atmospherics – the hospital is missing its top floor, following a fire; the state is investigating the deaths of patients – inject the narrative with the tension of a thriller. But the book more properly belongs to the American genre led by Anne Tyler and Lorrie Moore in which family damage is examined in detail. Reeves employs her protagonist’s profession as a shepherding metaphor. A follower of the psychological theories of BF Skinner and John B Watson (who argued that what humans do is more influenced by environmental factors than inheritance), Ed boasts, during life crises: “I’m a behaviourist. I can change other people. I can change myself.” Laura, however, has picked up enough of the discipline to know when he is trying to turn it against her, and to aim it back at him.
The 41 chapters, covering a decade from 1971, alternate the viewpoints of the couple, with the progress of Penelope emerging through their overlapping and contradictary accounts. “Here you go, beautiful,” a favoured line of Ed when passing a pre-dinner drink to his wife, is joltingly footnoted in one of her narrative strands: “I hate this version of him, the attentive kiss-ass.” Encountering an event or comment for a second time, readers are sometimes in the privileged position of already knowing what it means to the co‑narrator, allowing us to see wife or husband make a calamitous miscalculation.
In another example of Reeves’s technical finesse, Ed’s sections are third-person, while Laura’s are first-person, an approach nicely emphasising his clinical distance from even his own thoughts and actions, in contrast with her more open, and apparently honest, emotions.
The 1970s are clearly signalled by the copious drinking and smoking of the characters, even during pregnancies. However, despite more than half the story coinciding with the disgrace and resignation of President Nixon, the Watergate scandal is never mentioned. Later sections take place around the elections of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, but no one takes note of those events either, a historical silence that recalls Jane Austen’s omission of any direct reference to the Anglo-French wars in Pride and Prejudice. It’s possible, as some critics have argued for Austen, that the unmentioned public derangements may inflect the private behaviour. The larger authorial point, though, is surely that, even when the nation is facing fraught times, most people are more involved with what is going on in their house than in the White House.
The events of the book turn, without spelling it out, on divergent interpretations of words. A character is sent “home” from “a home”, residences with very different resonances, while someone else is threatened with the reverse journey. And different meanings of independence, dependency and interdependency, in both domestic and clinical situations, are explored in relationships not just between the central trio, but between friends, lovers and colleagues. This is a love story in which the lovers are sometimes unexpected, and scenes include a sexual moment of notably bold ambiguity. There, as elsewhere, Reeves leaves moral judgment to the reader.
Novels about relationships are themselves a form of behavioural psychology, and Reeves’s notes on the body and soul of a fictional practitioner of the discipline are a remarkable case study in the unpredictability and tenacity of attraction. While Cohen may be right about there being no cure for love, The Behaviour of Love has contributed a fresh and memorable addition to the literature on the condition.
• The Behaviour of Love by Virginia Reeves is published by Simon & Schuster (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
