The Behavior of Love
A Novel
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Publisher Description
A riveting, “psychologically acute” (Esquire) portrait of a marriage, from the Man Booker Prize–longlisted author of Work Like Any Other—“a deep saturation and beauty of experience” (The New Yorker).
Doctor Ed Malinowski believes he has realized most of his dreams. A passionate, ambitious behavioral psychiatrist, he is now the superintendent of a mental institution and finally turning the previously crumbling hospital around. He also has a home he can be proud of and a fiercely independent, artistic wife Laura, whom he hopes will soon be pregnant.
But into this perfect vision of his life comes Penelope, a beautiful, young epileptic who should never have been placed in his institution and whose only chance at getting out is Ed. She is intelligent, charming, and slowly falling in love with her charismatic, compassionate doctor. As their relationship grows more complicated, and Laura defiantly starts working at his hospital, Ed must weigh his professional responsibilities against his personal ones, and find a way to save both his job and his family.
“Reeves alternates between Ed and Laura’s perspectives in cunning ways, creating the rippling effect of a rushing river, as love flows and ebbs over a decade” (Entertainment Weekly). A love triangle set in one of the most chaotic settings imaginable, The Behavior of Love is “a sensitive examination of love, responsibility, and compassion” (Kirkus Reviews).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reeves (Work Like Any Other) forms an intense love triangle between a doctor, his wife, and one of his patients across the 1970s and '80s in her introspective latest. Psychologist Ed Malinowski recently moved to Montana to oversee the Boulder River School and Hospital, a chronically underfunded and understaffed mental institution. In order to quell his wife Laura's fears about his long sessions with, and not entirely professional praise for, his 16-year-old epileptic patient Penelope, Ed encourages Laura to come to the institution to teach art once a week. The plan backfires and Laura grows more weary of Ed's denials. In an effort to save his marriage, Ed releases Penelope to her parents as a shining example of his sweeping deinstitutionalization plans that are criticized by state officials and family members of the institutionalized. Soon, Laura is pregnant, but Ed misses the early birth of their son when he rushes to visit Penelope in the hospital after she abruptly stops her seizure medications. Things quickly fall apart for the characters an unmoored Ed drifts through a period of womanizing and heavy drinking, until a medical crisis brings all three together in unexpected, difficult ways. Readers who enjoy complex depictions of the lingering commitments of relationships will be swept away by Reeves's crisp, powerful novel.
