The Doctor's House
By Ann Beattie
Scribner, $24
ISBN 0743212649

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A family drama in three voices

Three narrators tell a harrowing story of family dysfunction in Ann Beattie's novel, The Doctor's House. The only one denied a voice is the doctor himself. But after hearing the others, you wouldn't want to give him that chance.

Nina, the widowed sister who lives in Cambridge, Mass., speaks first. What worries her is the way her brother keeps looking up girls the two of them knew in high school 25 years ago. Looking them up is one thing; sleeping with them is another, and the brother doesn't seem to know the difference. Nina supplies reasons for Andrew's obsessive behavior from the past. Their doctor father had affairs; their mother drank. And neither seemed to care what happened to the children.

In one humorous scene, Nina describes the time she and Andrew visited the weird girl in high school, and he ended up in a secret affair with her. Some readers will tire of Nina, who spends too much time worrying about her brother and his girlfriends. Even her job as a freelance copy editor working at home to correct other writers' efforts suits the non-person she has become. It has been decades since she smoked pot, dropped acid and chose her boyfriends for their inappropriateness.

Beattie's novel gathers force once the frustrated mother, the second narrator, begins to speak. The nuanced story she tells differs from Nina's black-and-white one.

"My mother cared, above all else, how things looked," Nina's mother recalls. So with her own children, she went the other way. Did she drink as much as Nina said she did? No, she doesn't think so.

The final awful version of family life in the doctor's house comes from Andrew, who depicts a scene so harsh and cruel it must be true. With Andrew's narrative, the role Nina played in the family dramas becomes clearer. Beattie, who won raves with her recent short story collection Perfect Recall, uses shifting points of view to tell one simple story of the family as a dangerous, closed society.

Anne Morris is a freelance writer in Austin.