With the same brilliant meld of zany humor, human emotion, and high truth that made his first novel, The House of God, a medical classic, Samuel Shem, himself a psychiatrist, plunges headlong into the world of contemporary psychoanalysis, bringing to it all the same passion, comedy, and probing intent. In Fine we see psychoanalysis fifty years after Freud, its bizarre rigidity, its potential greatness. A rich, many-leveled tale told with Shem's magical mix of the serious and the hilarious, Fine is an erotic love story ("all love stories are about three people"); a murder mystery (who is killing the shrinks of Boston?); a novel of modern relationships; and a tale of awesome self-discovery. In short, it is about life.
Seven years later—now a "perfectly analyzed human being"—this wonderfully open fellow has been transmogrified. Slimmed down, trussed up in his three-piece suit, straight-faced (jokes are aggressive), poor Fine is unaware that his marriage is failing (even Stephanie says: "Why are you analysts so weird?!"); he's lost his friends; he's separated from the world by a two-second psychoanalytic tape delay.
It takes the most extreme human dramas—being challenged by his patients, haunted by a murderer, deserted by his wife for a career as a stand-up comic, dealing with illness and infidelity—to shake him to the core. Only then does Fine realize how far he has fallen, how far he still has to journey to open up again, to become a husband, a friend, a true therapist, and, finally, a human being.