The Girl from Atlantis

By R.Z. Sheppard

Dr. August Perlman's new patient is a doozy, a 13-year-old girl with two personalities. One has a morbid fear of water; the other insists that she is a survivor of the mythic deluge that engulfed continental Atlantis millenniums before humans got around to organizing memory into history. Order a brain scan or a cocktail of antipsychotics? Neither choice is likely, not because the gorgon at the HMO refuses to sign off on the procedures but because Dr. Perlman's clinic for the interestingly unhinged is located in low-tech London at the beginning of the 20th century.

In Perlman's Ordeal (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 329 pages; $24), novelist Brooks Hansen has some serious fun imagining the case of Sylvie Blum, a.k.a. Nina, the pubescent bringer of confusion and disarray into the physician's otherwise detached and antiseptic existence. As a hypnotherapist, Perlman is a hands-off healer. As a closet onanist, he is a hands-on pioneer of safe sex.

The doctor's true passion is listening to classical music, preferably that composed by the great melodists of the 19th century. The literary equivalent of melody is, of course, story, the engaging what-next of narrative prose. Hansen's tersely told tale hangs expectantly on the outcome of Mistress Blum's treatment, which unexpectedly includes the arcane input of the enchanting Madame Helena Barrett and her spiritualist friends.

Naturally, Perlman has his rationalist assumptions upended. Hansen's serio-comic hero is another good poke at the preening self-confidence of science, in this case the budding efforts at the turn of the century to systematize the study of the mind.

Hansen deftly conveys these early probings at the border of myth and medicine. The sticky part of the novel is meshing Perlman's conventional musical opinions with his then radical psychology and the hocus-pocus of Sylvie/Nina's deep dive into legendary Atlantis. When the themes are eventually resolved in a kind of hypno-seance, Perlman's conflicted nature is dramatically illustrated. The music lover in the good doctor reacts against unmelodic compositions, while his physician side wants to reduce the lyrics of the subconscious to tuneless abstractions. He appears to have caught an incurable but nonfatal case of modern irony. But for a more thorough analysis, Perlman will have to survive until 1938, the year Sigmund Freud moves to London.

--By R.Z. Sheppard