Version of Love, A

Not since D. M. Thomas's bestseller <I>The White Hotel</I> has there been such a remarkable novel about women, hysteria, and the profession of psychiatry as practiced by men. Set in California and Mexico in the late 1950s and early 1960s, <I>A Version of Love</I> is a bizarrely riveting tale of transgressive desire. Its lead players form a precarious triangle: a psychoanalyst who sleeps with his patient; a female "hysteric" on the verge of being cured; and a loner in the Sierra foothills who goes panning for gold and then love. "A dazzling achievement" (Robert Olen Butler), "a work of almost spookily controlled intelligence,"<I>A Version of Love</I> is a breakthrough novel by Millicent Dillon, who "deserves to be honored as an American master of fiction" (Philip Lopate).