All for Love

Publishers Weekly

In this excruciatingly honest autobiographical work, author Mehta conducts an exquisite exploration of his love life as a young man, attempting to focus an objective lens on the most subjective of matters. The volume, the ninth in Mehta's Continents of Exile series, examines the blind writer's pathos-laden involvement with four different women while living in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s and working at the New Yorker. In rich, sensuous language, he paints a precise picture of people and place, skillfully depicting both India and Manhattan. Much of the memoir consists of letters between Mehta and his various lovers, and this epistolary element best represents the spectrum of emotions. The letters include the minutiae of relationships pet names, inside jokes, mundane retellings of the day's proceedings yet they also reveal a great deal of angst and psychological despair. Mehta demonstrates more than a little bravery by stripping his life to its essentials, and he succeeds magnificently in his endeavor, in part because of his detachment from the events he chronicles. The last section an account of Mehta's psychoanalysis represents the book's only significant flaw. Presented principally as a dialogue between the writer and his psychiatrist, it echoes clich?d Freudian exchanges between any patient and doctor. In the earlier chapters, Mehta proves his ability to contemplate and investigate his romances on his own, so the intrusion of the analyst is particularly grating. Though the concluding chapter falls short of those preceding, this elegant volume remains a striking piece of insight into the nature of love. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Since 1972 Mehta, a prolific author, MacArthur fellow, and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, has been producing a series of autobiographical works titled "Continents of Exile." This, the ninth volume in this series (after Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker), focuses on his relationships with four women during the 1960s. Each affair is related in meticulous detail, and although each was quite different, they all shared several characteristics: an early physical intimacy, Mehta's yearning to get married, and the woman's abandonment of him, followed by a long period of depression. It was significant, says Mehta, that during these relationships his blindness was never mentioned. Ultimately, these breakups led to a long period of psychoanalysis, which helped Mehta to accept his blindness and to understand his relationships better. Although Mehta's aim in the series has been to relate his experiences objectively "and so avoid the pitfalls of confessional writing," in this memoir he seems to re-create all the self-absorption, self-pity, and emotional turmoil that he spent years confessing on his psychotherapist's couch. This narcissistic brooding may appeal to Mehta's ardent fans, but most readers will find it hard to plod through. Suitable for larger public libraries. Ilse Heidmann, San Marcos, TX Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Four Girls and a Doctor: Mehta offers his recollections of the mostly unhappy love affairs that preoccupied his early years in New York, and of the psychoanalyst who helped him get over them. As a memoirist, Mehta (A Ved Mehta Reader, 1998, etc.) has made a career out of the rather extraordinary circumstances of his childhood and education. The son of a cultured and well-connected physician, Mehta grew up in India and nearly died of meningitis when he was four. Although he recovered, the raging fever brought on by the disease left him permanently blind. Since there were no schools for the blind in India at the time, Mehta was given an informal education at home by his father, and in 1949 (at 15), he traveled by himself to America and enrolled in a school for the blind in Little Rock, Arkansas. He later studied at Oxford and did graduate work at Harvard. This volume describes his early years in New York during the 1960s, when he was working as a staff writer at the New Yorker and beginning to establish his reputation as an essayist and journalist of renown. Most of the author's recollections here, however, are of the various women he fell in love with during that time. Some of the affairs (with the dancer Gigi, for instance) were uncomplicated and relatively harmless, but others (such as his long romance with a poet and graduate student named Kilty, whom he nearly married) failed spectacularly and left the author in deep depressions that took years of therapy to undo. The last section of the account depicts Mehta's dealing with one Dr. Bak, a Hungarian psychoanalyst who helped him sort out his feelings towards his lovers and himself. Moving and honest, if a trifle claustrophobic:Mehta's scrupulous attention to detail makes his account astonishing vivid and real, although many of the particular details (e.g., the prostate treatments he underwent to overcome his supposed impotence) are a tad more informative than necessary.