Postcards from Pinsk

Postcards from Pinsk is the story of a middle-aged Beacon Hill shrink coming to grips with himself. The “postcard” is the catalyst for crisis—his wife of long standing is divorcing him. It appears she has good reason, yet as Orrin Summers wrestles with solitude, self-deception, and a general inability to behave himself, the reader becomes increasingly comfortable inside Orrin’s witty, quirky persona and increasingly won over by the slightly goofy heroism of this distinctly antiheroic figure.

Long insulated from the real hurly burly of life, Orrin must take the late 1980s as he finds them making small talk with his ex-wife’s answering machine, coping with his daughter’s lovers, Hickey and Genghis Ferguson, fending off the private eye, Bemis, and finding surprising images of himself in The Man Crushed by Quarters, in The Boston Red Socks (and his own shoes), and in Pigford, a man of the streets with whom Orrin is forced to acknowledge “an irrefutable brotherhood of issues.”

Orrin’s roommate, Eli Paperman, a hyperactive lawyer, and Eli’s beautiful girlfriend, Marcy Green, are drawn with the humor and accuracy we have come to expect from Larry Duberstein. The author manages to be at once inside and outside their skins, with his skillful mix of detached irony and unfailing sympathy.

Postcards from Pinsk quietly and expertly observes a complex psychological event and in doing so avoids sentimentality, while affirming the value of one man’s small struggle for dignity. As always with Duberstein, the writing sparkles. A great deal of the pleasure of the novel is in its language, and in the little peregrinations through the streets and seasons of Boston, and through the daily rounds and revelations of its characters.