Dr. Albert Prendergast, one of the eminent psychiatrists in Christopher Hogart’s new novel, Shrunk, is everything you’d look for in a therapist. He’s a titled clinician at a leading hospital. He has a thriving private practice and the respect of his patients and colleagues. He’s also crazy as a loon, the sole occupant of a paranoid rabbit hole that Hogart pulls us into in his satiric—and scary—examination of the mental health of some of our mental health professionals.
Meet Henry and Helena Avalon. He’s a psychiatrist. She’s expecting. They’ve just moved to Adams Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right next door to Prendergast who methodically sets out to destroy Avalon, professionally and personally. Say what you will about Prendergast; he may be a self-righteous malcontent, but as a psychiatrist, he knows a thing or two about getting inside people’s heads.
“There are things so perverse that only a professional, well-educated person with pretenses to intelligence could think them up,” explains Avalon to his wife as they struggle to defend themselves against Prendergast’s diabolical pathology. Prendergast’s casserole of envy and spite is delicately prepared in this delicious horror story-cum-satire. At times laugh-out-loud funny, Hogart skillfully manages to find the perfect balance between humor and suspense as he teases out his theme of how tricky getting to truth can be—even for therapists trained in doing so. The visceral sense of injustice the author creates, not to mention the reader’s desire for revenge, are palpable on these pages—as one might expect from a practicing psychotherapist skilled in eliciting feelings.
