Deep End is Shallow

The Deep End

By Chris Crutcher

William, Morrow & Co., Inc.

$19.00

The book jacket and title of The Deep End are blase; unfortunately, the content is not much different. Still, it is a shame that Chris Crutcher's publishers did not spend more on the title and jacket, because they mislead the reader into believing that the book is some excessively corny venue for housewives' entertainment.

In fact, The Deep End possesses a fairly suspenseful plot--it is billed as a "psychological thriller"--and Crutcher makes it believable by drawing upon his experiences as a therapist for abused children. He uses shock value to interest his reader, relying on the same brand of nauseating descriptions as Thomas Harris (The Silence of the Lambs).

Crutcher bases the protagonist of the novel, Wilson Corder, upon himself. Corder is a child therapist who attempts to decipher what has happened to abused children by talking with them. He gets them to cooperate by using a controversial examination method called play therapy--he has children act out their trauma through toys.

Corder's first client is four year-old Jerry Parker, who Wilson suspects knows some secret about the recent kidnapping of the boy's sister. When the play therapy comes close to revealing a name. Corder receives threats to leave the case alone. The plot seems prosaic until the first threat--the crucifixion of Corder's cat on his door--is carried out. The perpetrator of this violence keeps the reader guessing what his next move will be.

Meanwhile, one of Wilson's colleagues has an affair with Jerry's mother and fears that Jerry will reveal too much in therapy sometime.

Wilson's second client, a three-year-old named Craig, supposedly has been scalded in hot water by his stepfather. Both would normally end up in a psychiatrist's office but the stepfather has a reputation to protect and vehemently denies the allegation. After all, he is the respected Dr. Banner of the pacific Northwest, who, ironically, specializes in anger control seminars.

In play therapy, Corder discovers all kinds of juicy information and ends up playing the role of the third-party-who-knows-a-deadly-secret-so-he-has-to -be- killed role. Now both Wilson's colleague and Dr. Banner posses the motive to kill Corder and they put pressure on the therapist to abandon his cases. Eventually Corder succumbs to their requests, but only after the killer attacks his daughter and then sets his house afire.

The book's most suspenseful moment occurs when Dr. Banner's henchman takes Corder's family hostage aboard a boat somewhere on a river in Oregon. Fortunately. Corder was a champion long-distance swimmer in college--hence, the title. By this point, it is clear that crutcher's talent does not lie in developing plot--it would have been more believable had his family been taken hostage in their home and Corder had been a commando in the military than to have him swim across large bodies of water.

By the end, Crutcher describes a complete psychological profile of the killer and smoothes over the end of the story but leaves the reader without answering one itching question he posed in the beginning: why was Jerry's sister kidnapped in the first place and by whom?

Crutcher brings extraordinary insight about clinical psychology to the story--the only aspect of the book that warrants such a description. However, The Deep End is not a great novel because the plot lacks structure and he fails to tie up its loose ends.

Crutcher also has numerous tangential stories within his plot, concerning felons who were abused when they were young--Crutcher even has one save Wilson's life. It seems that the author wants to encourage psychologists to accept play therapy with the same authority Upton Sinclair exercised on the meat-packing industry.

The Deep End is stimulating reading, at least the parts that involve play therapy. Unfortunately, the plot possesses neither the cohesiveness nor the sense of reality that will make it a hot item in local book stores.