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There are few places less impressed by a fallen pharmaceutical executive than a free clinic. The coffee is bad, the paperwork inexhaustible, and the patients have problems for which a résumé offers little relief. For Raj, the disgraced psychiatrist at the center of J. Brian Turk’s novel, Boston Psychiatric, this constitutes a thorough education.
Once a celebrated CEO, Raj arrives at the clinic after a government conviction, a prison sentence, and parole. His former life supplied the trappings of importance. His new one is filled with suspicious colleagues and administrative obligations. Whatever authority he once possessed must now survive contact with people who have no particular reason to admire him.
Brian has assembled a professional history that suggests a reluctance to remain in any one waiting room. He has been an Air Force intelligence officer, a security consultant, a filmmaker, an actor, and a stand-up comedian. His father, a commercial writer and speechwriter whose work brought him into the circles of power and fame, offered an early introduction to the distance between what people say and what they mean. For a novelist, this is useful territory.
The book began as an independent film project in 2009, developed with Boston actors and medical professionals. Its eventual migration to fiction allowed Brian to create a setting whose doors remain open to everyone. A free clinic brings together people whom more orderly institutions prefer to direct elsewhere. It also makes an effective laboratory for examining the habits of the person holding the prescription pad.
The question animating Raj’s predicament is whether a person can become more than the worst thing he has done. Literature has considerable experience with this inquiry. Institutions generally prefer a checkbox. Brian locates his story in the uncomfortable space between them, where a criminal record is both an indispensable fact and an insufficient biography.
His comic training helps keep the proceedings from becoming a seminar in second chances. At Boston’s Improv Asylum, Brian encountered the discipline of “Yes, and,” an instruction to accept what another person offers before attempting to add anything.
Applied to psychiatry, it suggests that listening might precede classification. Applied to Raj, it requires surrendering the assumption that expertise entitles him to control the scene.
Dr. Hodgkins, with his devotion to administrative procedure, embodies the consolations of a world properly filed. The joke has an edge. Paperwork can document care while quietly consuming the time required to provide it.
Brian distinguishes forgiveness from redemption. Someone else may grant the former. The latter involves repeatedly showing up to repair what one has damaged. The broken window needs replacing even after the neighbor accepts an apology.
For Raj, this means acquiring a less glamorous understanding of usefulness. His patients cannot restore his reputation and treating them cannot cancel his past. They can, however, interrupt his preoccupation with it. In the clinic’s untidy daily exchanges, J. Brian Turk finds a modest possibility. A physician who has lost the privileges of being important may finally begin to notice what another person needs… and stay long enough to help.