Katayoun Medhat

Reviews say as much about their writers as they do about the works they review. And so I say a special heartfelt and humbled thank you to Dr Robert Snell* whose beautifully written, insightful review of ‘The Quality of Mercy’ was published in the European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling.

BOOK REVIEW
The quality of mercy, by Katayoun Medhat, Fredonia, NY, Leapfrog Press,
2017, 285 pp., £12 (Paperback), ISBN 978-935248-95-8, $10.44 (e-book),
ISBN 978-1935248-96-5
Katayoun Medhat is not the first analytic psychotherapist to have written a really stunning and original novel. But she is perhaps the first to have conveyed, and in such an elegant, witty and embodied way, something so profound and moving about the values and ethics of psychotherapy. She has done this not by writing directly about psychotherapy as a practice – this is in fact a detective novel and a
murder mystery – but through the attitude, the orientation towards life, that informs her prose and shapes the reflections and actions of her main character. In one sense we learn little about this protagonist, if this is quite the right word for him; we hear that he is Jewish, but we are given scant biographical detail, and no physical description. He is, as it were, filled in from the inside. He is known, cypher-like, as ‘K’, and it is not always clear from moment to moment which ‘K’ it is, hero or author, who is engaging the reader. The character K’s full given name is Franz Kafka, and this leads to further problems of identity; the novel is set in the south-western United States, specifically the Navajo Nation, where K’s great Czech namesake is hardly a household word: he becomes ‘Cuffcares’ or ‘Cuthberts’ or ‘Cathcarts’. Medhat, who was herself raised in Iran, grew up in Germany and Austria, and lives in England, brings a European, international and anthropological perspective to her novel, and this opens up a particular sense of space, of wonder, awe, puzzlement and danger, a sort of emotional and mental equivalent to the vast landscapes that she evokes so tellingly.
If this perspective is imbued with European absurdism and old-world phenomenology and existentialism, it does not take the sharp sociopolitical edge from the world it reveals, the violence, displacement, racism, meth- and alcohol-fuelled despair that can blight the borderlands. K is a conscious, sentient entity to whom things happen, and like Kafka’s K he is caught in processes and networks he can never really hope to understand. He registers the landscape, the weather, and animal life of all kinds (the novel is punctuated with superb descriptive passages), from a horned toad, to a bluebottle that crashes into the ‘solid air’ of a window pane, to the local population of prairie dogs facing extermination by gassing. We come to ‘know’ K through what and the ways in which he sees. But he is gifted with no especially superior powers of perception (although his sidekick Robbie, who can read tracks like a text, retains impressive fieldcraft skills from his tribal past). Uncertain, vulnerable, prone to intense guilt, and wryly funny in his internal and external speech, K is endowed with that Keatsian ‘negative capability’ that W. R. Bion was so fond of invoking (‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts’), a sort of right-brain, idly scanning, awareness: he is actively available for what happens, and, just when the reader may be despairing as to his professional fitness for policing, he is able to bring a precise left-brain focus to bear on his phenomenological world. He knows the difference between what Bion called ‘minus-K’ and ‘plus-K’ (could Medhat perhaps have had this in the back of her mind?): supposed knowledge that like William Blake’s ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ tyrannises and imprisons, and that which generates, risks producing dreams and the capacity to dream. The use K makes of his attention is quietly astonishing. The novel hangs, finally, on two non-events: the ‘quality of mercy’ reveals itself in K’s refusal, twice within the same day, to press a suspect and a witness each of whom is on the verge of confessing or pointing to a terrible crime. His judgement, which seems to proceed from no profound prior reflection, is that the suspects involved, both men, are now irreplaceable role models in their community. K’s openness is finally openness to death, and it brings with it an extraordinary, Levinasian tenderness. ‘I would do the same for you’, says the murderer whom K does finally discover: the act of killing here is itself a form of mercy, and a reintroduction, in a world critically bereft of fathers, to chthonic forces beneath the desert crust.
For K, the law is not blind – any more than Medhat’s novel is a usual police procedural. This indeed is its point. It is a novel about emotional, moral and ethical positioning and responsibility, although K would risk his friend Robbie’s mockery if he were even to think of putting it like this. It is other things too: a buddy novel, a work of history and collective and inter-generational trauma, a play with genre, from noir (Medhat has a finely tuned ear for quick-fire repartee) to road movie with a nod through the rear-view mirror to Hunter S. Thompson. It deals with the pragmatics and compromises of daily living in a land that is far less than promised, its institutions deeply flawed. It is nevertheless a novel of kindness, depth and generosity, and it is under no illusions both as to the best as well as to the worst of what we can be.
It is, finally, part of a series, number one of Medhat’s projected ‘Milagro Mysteries’. The faintly sacramental ring of ‘Mysteries’ is apropos. Like a Navajo sand-painting the book is one among many, finished in its own right but also still provisional, its themes to be taken up again, like those of an analytic session – and all the more profound for that.
Robert Snell
Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice, Brighton, UK
© 2018 Robert Snell

European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/13642537.2018.1462547

*Robert Snell is author of :

PORTRAITS OF THE INSANE: Theodore Gericault and the Subject of Psychotherapy; Karnac 2017

UNCERTAINTIES,MYSTERIES, DOUBTS: Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude; Routledge 2013

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