Moral Treatment

Carpenter’s evocative debut novel (after the story collection Missing Persons) centers on a teen’s commitment to a mental asylum in northern Michigan in 1889. Amy Underwood, 17, is raised by her father and stepmother, her mother having died by suicide years earlier. After she’s nearly raped by a group of lumberjacks, her father, worried she will meet a fate similar to her mother’s, has her examined by a psychiatrist who deems her insane. She’s taken to an institution run by an aging doctor referred to only by his first name, James, who swears by a system of “moral treatment” consisting of healthy food, rest, and virtuous activity. There, Amy befriends fellow patient Letitia Olsen, who claims James has been raping her. The story alternates between Amy’s and James’s points of view, as Amy writes letters to a woman who visited the asylum, pleading to get her and Letitia out, and James’s attempts to manage the hospital amid challenges from an ambitious younger assistant. Throughout, Carpenter maintains a hazy boundary between what’s actually occurred and what the characters have only imagined, inviting readers to draw their own conclusions. Along the way, Carpenter holds the reader’s attention with thorough descriptions of the asylum and the characters’ period-specific sensibilities. For fans of Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch, this is worth a look. (Feb.)