Review of CASE STUDY by Graeme Macrae Burnet

 3.5 Stars

Having read and enjoyed the author’s His Bloody Project, I was interested in reading his latest, Case Study, which was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. 

A writer, GMB, had written about Collins Braithwaite, a 1960s psychotherapist and member of the anti-psychiatry movement.  He has been toying with the idea of writing Braithwaite’s biography when he is contacted by Martin Grey offering him six notebooks written by his cousin who was once Braithwaite’s patient. 

The novel alternates between a notebook and biographical information about Braithwaite.  The notebooks are a first person account written by an unnamed young woman whose older sister Veronica recently committed suicide.  Under the pseudonym of Rebecca Smyth, she visits Braithwaite believing he bears responsibility for Veronica’s death.  As the notebooks progress, the narrator sinks into depression and becomes confused about her own identity:  she begins to see Rebecca as a separate person.  She loses sight of her initial objective in seeing the psychotherapist and becomes invested in his “therapy.”

Braithwaite is an imposter with no real training as a psychotherapist.  He himself admits that his talent is in listening:  “’time and again, I was told of my perceptiveness, of how I understood.  All I did was listen.  When a visitor arrives believing you are some kind of guru, your thoughts are already invested with profundity.’”  He is very egotistical and manipulative.  I found him repugnant.

The unnamed narrator I found much more interesting.  She is, to say the least, odd.  For instance, “He took my bag from the floor.  I was terrified for a moment that he was going to find the dead mouse wrapped in tissue paper” and “I hand replaced the [telephone] receiver and wiped it clean of my fingerprints” and an optimistic period in her life she describes as an “embarrassing interlude.”  The persona she adopts to visit Braithwaite she comes to see as an individual separate from her.  Some of her comments suggest she suffers from dissociative identity disorder:  “I sometimes wonder whether I shouldn’t let her take over completely.”

Readers come to realize that this narrator is not reliable.  She claims, “I have no talent for dissembling,” but she is good at pretending and lying in her therapy sessions.  Her ease at adopting a false persona should inspire one to ask what other truths she is hiding.  Should her notebooks be accepted as the truth or a version of it? 

The novel examines the nature of self and suggests that we all wear masks or adopt identities depending on the situation; perhaps we should “embrace the idea that a person is not a single self, but a bundle of personae.”  We are all, like the song that Rebecca hears, great pretenders, or as Braithwaite says, “’phoneys. . . . You’d be a lot happier if you accepted it.’”  Maybe we all have multiple personalities and that in itself is not a disorder. 

The book offers interesting ideas for the reader to consider; I did not, however, find the novel as entertaining as His Bloody Project.