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A Novel for the Couch
A Review by Tyler Cabot

To read Australian author Elliot Perlman's epic second novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity, is to undergo a two-week therapy session. Woven around the kidnapping of a young child by his mother's ex-lover, the novel is divided into seven sections, each with a different narrator offering another account of the story. (Think Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! set in a world where the stock market has replaced the plantation.) Perlman writes with such convincing simplicity -- his sentences read like whiskey-fueled confessions -- that you can't help but imagine being locked in a room with his characters, devising a plan to palliate their woes. Soon, though, their shortcomings begin to feel like your burden. As wires get crossed, your own boarded-up history starts pounding its way out; it's a short trip from the therapist's chair to the patient's couch.

Perlman's implicit challenge is to sew together a fabric of truth: Why can't Simon, an idealistic alcoholic, come to terms with the loss of his first love? Will the kidnapping of her child drive Anna back to Simon? With each narration, however, reality becomes more elusive. We can't trust any of the narrators because they lean on their emotions too much. We can't trust ourselves because Perlman makes us care too much. In the end, the young lawyer turned novelist is simply proving a point: You may swear that you see your life with clarity, understand why she left you, and know what others see when you walk in the door. But you know what? You don't know shit. And you know what else? You probably never will. As we dig ravenously through Perlman's sentences, our charge is to sort fact from fiction, perception from actuality. It's a task as damning as it is enjoyable.

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