Robert Barasch

Parallel Play: a Novel Robert Barasch

George Adams, a young attorney, becomes fascinated by the possibility of enacting a recurrent dream of public nakedness. On a Sunday morning, he drops his family at the door of their church, then disrobes in the car and walks down the aisle of the church with no clothes on. This adventure leads to his being pressured into seeing a psychiatrist. He makes an appointment and begins seeing a medical student who is doing a psychiatric rotation. George and Harvey, the student therapist, both beginners, engage in psychotherapy; they also become friends. George also decides to learn to play polo, not knowing that Harvey's grandfather is a former polo player. There are zany characters in the story, including Harvey's supervisor; a man who kidnaps George's wife, Marjorie; and a womanizing polo player who convinces Marjorie to visit his television office in New York, where she is kidnapped. Meanwhile, Harvey has made a relationship with a young model, Moravia, whose mother is the daughter of one of Sigmund Freud's famous patients and whose father is an eccentric who befriends Harvey's grandfather Cassius, an aging attorney who takes a liking to George and hires him into his law firm. As the story moves through the activities of the foregoing characters, it alludes to both the productive and nonproductive aspects of modern psychiatry and its place in contemporary culture.