Alix Ohlin's ‘Inside' a twisty, clever tale of desperation and hope

Inside
By Alix Ohlin
Alfred A. Knopf. 258 pp. $25

Alix Ohlin's dynamic new novel Inside begins like a thriller: The body of a man is face down in the snow, discovered by a lone skier just as daylight is fading. Only the man isn't dead; he's a frustrated suicide who tried to hang himself from a tree on a lonely mountainside near Montreal, only to have the branch give way. Tug probably would have died of hypothermia if a highly competent therapist named Grace hadn't stumbled upon him a few minutes later. The intrigue is immediate; why did Tug want to die and why is seemingly sensible Grace so irresistibly drawn to him?

Granted, she's an innate rescuer who was once "the kind of child who brought home injured birds and tried to nurse them back to health," but despite that sweet description, Grace never seems a sap. She feels bound to Tug because of whatever twist of fate put them both on that mountain on that winter's day. A lonely divorcee, she's also attracted to him. She knows Tug is "a troubled person, one more likely to suck her into his trouble than to be drawn out of it." But she won't or can't leave him alone, turning up at his door, his workplace, all with the hope of persuading him to stay on this Earth.

Physician, heal thyself, right? It's not just the blindness of lust and love affecting her, though. What Tug represents is a chance for Grace to be boldly interventionist. It wouldn't be appropriate for Grace to pay a visit to the overbearing parents of Annie, her teenage patient with a cutting habit, even though Grace the decent, helpful human being sometimes wishes she could be that direct.

But such rules go out the window with Tug; he is personally alluring and a professional challenge, without the rules. Inside is about the desire to make a difference in another person's life and the difficult odds against actually doing so.

Ohlin, whose books include a novel, The Missing Person, and a story collection, Babylon and Other Stories, skips around in time and place. She opens in Montreal in 1996, leaps forward to Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11 and then onward to 2006, when Grace's ex-husband, Mitch, also a therapist, travels to the far northern reaches of Canada to work with Inuit patients.

There are so many desperate people contained in the pages of this slim volume — three people kill themselves, while others walk out on family, career or love affairs — but Inside never feels like a downer. That's because what Ohlin extracts from these tragedies, from the horror of people who step out in front of a truck or swallow a bottle of pills, is what the experiences do for Grace and Mitch. They shake them up, change their perceptions and ultimately, set both therapists on an unexpected and hopeful new course.

There's no fuss in Ohlin's pointed prose, but plenty of insight. She conjures up the diving board, all-or-nothing desperation of going to bed with someone for the first time with the straightforward declaration that "some things were too intense to do slowly."

As a reader, I get grouchy when rerouted from a plotline I'm happily engaged with. But Ohlin's purposeful dislocations never feel like disconnects. When she veers off to the story of the strange relationship between Anne, an emotionally withdrawn aspiring actress, and the decidedly not endearing runaway she offhandedly decides to help, the new narrative thread quickly proves just as alluring. (The romantic travails of pathologically passive Mitch are less interesting.)

Anne, of course, turns out to be the adult version of Grace's patient Annie, that teenager who could be the soul sister of Mia Wasikowska's character from In Treatment.

My minor quibble with this twisty, clever and captivating read is the way Ohlin leaves the Anne narrative hanging (I'd have happily read 100 more pages about her). Except for a tantalizing glimpse of a near-reunion between patient and therapist, Anne remains a deliberately unfinished character. For Ohlin, presumably she's ultimately relevant only as she relates to Grace's experience of reinvention; Anne's future lies outside as it were, set aside from Grace and Mitch, these two specialists of what's inside. Mining the internal, they find new truths about themselves. The title also makes for an unintended endorsement of Ohlin's skills; this cunning writer yanks you inside her world.