EMPATHY

The hyper-observant, gritty-honest voice that characterizes all of Schulman’s lesbian protagonists (People in Trouble, 1989; After Delores, 1988) is now cooler, steadier, and more refined—here, “Anna O.” meets “Doc,” post-Freudian analyst to the denizens of the doomed Lower East Side, and she finds love and a measure of peace in the process.

Jilted by a woman in white leather, and adrift in a world that rejects psychoanalysis, Marxism, all the good Jewish intellectual skills, Anna O. turns to Doc—a short, slightly pudgy Jewish guy who looks amazingly like Anna as a man. Funny about that. Anna is instantly helped by Doc even if he does live in a “basic” East Village apartment with no TV and barely any electricity because—observing this benign, slightly potbellied male—Anna feels liberated from two lifelong fears: “I feared being told ‘You want to be a man,’ and I feared being told ‘You hate men.’” Doc tells Anna that she’s empathy-less, that she suffers above all from an almost extinct ability to listen and care about other people's feelings—even the treacherous feelings of the woman in white. Anna confesses that in her whole long bumpy ride as a lesbian she’s always been involved with ambivalent bisexuals or wannabe-straights. Finally, however, thanks to Doc, Anna has one last stormy scene with “white leather” and breaks through to a new level of self-acceptance—and to a brand-new love. Schulman, as always, peppers her novel with some wonderful raw insights straight from the edge of the world on the Lower East Side.

But such a smart, uncompromising protagonist as Anna deserves a little dramatic momentum and a stronger plot.