Abstract
Thomas Ogden is widely regarded as America’s most original and influential psychoanalyst. The author of eleven books of essays on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, several of which have already become classics, he has also contributed invaluable critical readings of Freud, Winnicott, Bion, Fairbairn, Loewald, and others. In addition, Ogden has written insightful and discerning studies of a number of literary masters including Frost, Borges, Kafka, Seamus Heaney, and Wallace Stevens.
Now Tom Ogden has himself written a masterful novel, The Parts Left Out. His first effort in the genre, it in no way reads like the debut novel of a writer still learning his craft. This is a highly accomplished literary work. A tragic tale both stark and unrelenting, the novel unfolds with the inevitability of a Greek drama. Indeed, it portrays individuals who, like characters in those classical dramas, are driven to live out their tragic destinies by unconscious forces as powerful as the dictates of the gods.
The Parts Left Out tells the story of the Bromfmans, a Midwestern farm family whose lives seem on the surface as parched and arid as land ravaged by dust storms. In their youth, the father, Earl, had dreams of being an architect; the mother, Marta, a restorer of rare books. When during a relationship in their college years that served their need for stability and security but was devoid of passion or romance, Marta became pregnant with an unwanted child and refused to terminate the pregnancy. Earl, feeling honor-bound to marry her, hoped that a child would both strengthen their relationship and provide him the loving family he craved.
This hope, however, was dashed by the harsh realities of life and the bitter disappointments that both Earl and Marta go on to suffer; these disappointments, along with the frustrations of daily life, have bred an inner fury that poisons everyone in the family, building until it can no longer be contained. When at last it breaks out, the tragedy that has been waiting in the wings, foreordained by Earl’s and Marta’s long-standing character problems and the toxic mixture that is their marriage, strikes with devastating effect on all concerned.
The novel opens dramatically with a powerful depiction of this devastating event. Ogden then takes the reader on a journey of discovery as he chronicles Earl’s and Marta’s personal and family histories, histories that, taken together, make tragedy inevitable.
Ogden tells this compelling story in a style that matches its content. It is simple, muscular, and powerful. Few words are wasted as scenes are depicted in a spare and stark manner that captures not only the bleak landscape but the emotional climate in which Earl and Marta live. Some of Ogden’s descriptions of Midwestern farm life are remarkable. Not only do they paint a vivid picture of that hard-bitten life; they evoke the mood and atmosphere of that world as it existed on the American plains. Take this passage for instance: Farm life was a life ruled by nature in ways the town kids could sense, but could never really grasp. Forces of immense power—hundreds of miles of black clouds of locust that eclipse the sun; league after league of wheat blight that has the power to destroy an entire year’s labor of thousands of people; farm animals’ desolation after a stillbirth; the havoc wreaked by an aberrant early frost or a summer hail storm—all of this hovered silently over the farm kids, knowledge that nature has no enemies, nor does it have its favorites, knowledge that drew these children inward into terrible fear in the face of the limits of their parents’ power to control their own fate, much less that of their children [pp. 1–2].
A sense of bleakness pervades this story, a bleakness that invades the lives of the characters in a way that ultimately infects the reader as well. There is no leavening humor here, and little relief from the relentlessness of the unfolding tragedy. It is no mean achievement to depict the march of tragedy in this way, but the risk in doing so is to create characters who appear to have no dimension other than their troubled side, the side that brings on the disasters. One wonders if Earl and Marta ever experience joy, pleasure, hope, moments of shared laughter, a lightening of their spirits. If they do, these sides are not shown. This deliberately narrow focus has a mixed effect. On the one hand, it adds to the power of the novel and its fundamental message: that character is destiny. On the other, it lends a unidimensional quality to the major characters, making them more believable as tragic figures than as multifaceted human beings.
Ogden shows the ability, here and elsewhere, not only to make the reader see what he sees, but to share the emotional impact of this experience. This gives an immediacy and sense of truthfulness to the narrative that adds to its compelling quality.
Remarkable, too, is Ogden’s depiction of the onset of an acute psychosis. His rendering of that experience is extraordinary. It captures the bewilderment, the increasing anxiety, the outbreak of the psychosis itself with its delusional thinking, with a veracity that only one who has deep knowledge of, and experience with, serious mental illness could achieve. Ogden accomplishes this without recourse to technical language or the vocabulary of the clinician. He is, of course, a superb clinician, and his contributions to our understanding of serious mental illness are without peer. But to his great credit, in depicting such an illness Tom Ogden, novelist, discards his clinician’s hat and draws on his gift for evocative language to render a picture of a developing psychosis that will long live in memory.
As will The Parts Left Out. Long after finishing this book it stays with you, haunting you like the ghosts of the embattled characters and invading your dreams. In this respect, it is reminiscent of the best fiction of Steven King and other masters of the horror genre. For this novel, too, is a horror story. At the same time, in the playing out of tragic destinies, it reminds one of Faulkner in its emphasis on the transmission, from one generation to the next, of character pathology that brings on death and disaster.
In this work, Ogden demonstrates the range of his creativity. Not only is he the most creative psychoanalytic author writing today, but in this first novel he shows himself to be a wonderful teller of tales. The Parts Left Out is an auspicious achievement. As a work of fiction it succeeds in accomplishing that most difficult of feats: to be at once a spellbinder and an in-depth exploration of human traits that bring on unspeakable tragedy. Tom Ogden knows the human mind as few do. In The Parts Left Out he demonstrates his remarkable understanding not only of the mind, but of the human heart as well.