FICTION

POSTCARDS FROM PINSK by Larry Duberstein (The Permanent Press: $21.95; 244 pp.). Larry Duberstein’s novel about a 58-year-old Boston shrink going through a mid-life crisis is somewhat like psychotherapy itself: It’s leisurely and civilized, and nothing much seems to be happening on the surface. Clues pop up--some true, some false. How to tell them apart?

The title is a false clue; this is no story of Eastern European oppression. Duberstein (“Nobody’s Jaw,” “Carnovsky’s Retreat”) merely uses it as a metaphor for what has happened to Dr. Orrin Summers: His wife, Gail, has left him unexpectedly. “In Russia just after the revolution,” she tells him, “the marriage laws apparently became quite informal. In Pinsk, in 1929, the only requirement for a divorce was a postcard. Either party could send one, to the other, and the marriage was done for.”

Denying reality as strenuously as do any of his patients, Summers refuses to believe that Gail is gone for good. Waiting for her to return, he wobbles into depression, drinks too much, cries on the shoulders of long-suffering colleagues and fixates on TV weathermen and the fortunes of the Red Sox. He has a detective trail his long-absent daughter, a rock singer. Finally, he takes a male roommate--a hyperactive young lawyer who happens to have a beautiful girlfriend.

A clue that seems false, but turns out to be true, is that Summers once hit his wife. At first his courtly, kindly ways seem to belie this. Then, when we accept that the good doctor has a rogue streak in him, we overreact the other way and assume that it’s the key to his family’s alienation. Duberstein urges a more sophisticated view. What gets Summers into trouble, he suggests, also helps him get out of it. Boston helps, too. The seasons pass in stately panoply, there’s chamber music by the Charles, and Brahmins and bums alike have a witty way with words.