Postcards from Pinsk

Postcards from Pinsk is the story of a middle-aged Beacon Hill shrink coming to grips with himself. The "postcard" is the catalyst for crisis—his wife of long standing is divorcing him. It appears she has good reason, yet as Orrin Summers wrestles with solitude, self-deception, and a general inability to behave himself, the reader becomes increasingly comfortable inside Orrin's witty, quirky persona and increasingly won over by the slightly goofy heroism of this distinctly antiheroic figure. Long insulated from the real hurly burly of life, Orrin must take the late 1980s as he finds them making small talk with his ex-wife's answering machine, coping with his daughter's lovers, Hickey and Genghis Ferguson, fending off the private eye, Bemis, and finding surprising images of himself in The Man Crushed by Quarters, in The Boston Red Socks (and his own shoes), and in Pigford, a man of the streets with whom Orrin is forced to acknowledge "an irrefutable...