By Blood by Ellen Ullman; FSG, $27
San Francisco novelist Ellen Ullman makes her current livelihood as a writer, but back in the late 1970s she held a rare occupation as a female computer code programmer at the genesis of the technological revolution. Now recognized as an amazing accomplishment, Ullman translated the "human side" of a computer programmer's work into an acclaimed 1997 memoir called Close to the Machine, which was followed by The Bug, a dark, thrilling novel whose paperback edition coincides with the publication of this new novel By Blood, another major accomplishment.
Ullman's latest is a departure of sorts, in that it doesn't feature computers, computer coding, or programmers, and instead is a psychological thriller that follows a therapist (frustratingly nameless) who is forced to relinquish his university position during a hot summer in 1970s San Francisco (think Free Love and the Zodiac Killer, with Patty Hearst overtones). Disgraced by a perceived ethics violation on campus ("my banishment"), the professor rents office space in a shadowy building to take on new patients, but something else captures his favor quickly: the woman who rents the adjacent office to hold her own therapy sessions.
One particular patient of this neighboring psychotherapist, Germanic Dr. Dora Schussler, captures the professor's attention, especially since he is able to clearly overhear their histrionic therapy sessions through the walls. Of particular interest is Schussler's lesbian patient, a nameless woman who is at odds with both her adoptive status (Ullman herself is adopted) and her past as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. As the plot unravels, ramping up the narrative tension and a delightful sense of delusional confusion for the reader, more details unfurl about Dr. Dora's own history, as both she and the nosy professor become enraptured by the lesbian patient.
Ullman's prose is the seasoned work of a master craftsman: crisp, clipped, economic phrasing that reveals just enough to tease the mind and lick at the senses. As the professor listens in on Dr. Schussler's sessions, he describes so much more than the breezy words doctor and patient exchange. Whether it is the muted whoosh of a tissue being extracted from a cardboard box or the "clicks and whirring sounds" of a voice recorder or the slight "nylon upon nylon" tension of stocking-ed legs crossing and uncrossing, Ullman employs the delight of the senses to full use in a narrative that amounts to an amazing feast for the reader's imaginative mind.
In a brooding, suspenseful, sensory mystery that surpasses the excellence of her first novel, Ullman continues to enchant and make San Francisco proud to have her as one of our own.