New Release: Frieda’s Song

It’s clear that Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s imagination is captured by historic buildings that hold the unique and intriguing stories of the lives indelibly imprinted within them; it’s also clear that she is just the one to tell those stories. Her first novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, focused on the role of the Bedford Springs Hotel in Pennsylvania as the holding location for a group of high-level Japanese prisoners at the end of World War II.

In Campbell’s latest novel, Frieda’s Song, the building is a cottage, designed in the 1930s by and for renowned German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichman, on the grounds of the Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium in Rockville, Maryland; here, she lived and worked for more than twenty years.

The cottage serves as the anchor point for a parallel narrative in which we follow Frieda’s story and, 70 years later, that of therapist Eliza Kline and her teenage son Nick, who are renting the cottage even as the acreage of the old sanatorium is being given over to high-end suburban housing.

The novel opens with Frieda’s first-person narration, as she is forced to abandon her successful hospital in Heidelberg in 1935 as the Nazi noose tightens, leaving for America with her best friend and fellow therapist Gertrud even as her mother and sisters refuse to leave Germany. We meet her younger, estranged husband Erich (who is destined to become even more famous a therapist than his wife), and learn that Frieda is fated to grow deaf, just as her mother and father had—an impossible handicap for a psychotherapist.

Shifting into the near-present day of 2009, Eliza drives to pick up Nick from summer camp, where he’s been kicked out for starting a fire. A single mother, Eliza is drowning in the deep end of attempting to raise a sullen, isolated teenage boy, her training as a therapist seeming to offer no help to her in her own situation — especially since she has committed the cardinal sin of lying about Nick’s paternity. She finds herself talking to Frieda’s portrait as her own form of therapy, and later discovers a trove of Frieda’s journals, the source of that first-person account. Eliza takes comfort in Frieda’s quiet influence as she attempts to steer a course for both herself and Nick.

Campbell lets us in to Nick’s head, too, which is a jumble of anger, confusion, and inarticulate longing that he tries to assuage with matches and razor blades. For the reader, experiencing the world through Nick’s eyes makes it even clearer how little Eliza is truly seeing and hearing her son.

This concept of close, active listening — of the healing value that it offers, and of the damage caused by its absence — is one of the novel’s continuous threads. Frieda is painfully aware of her encroaching deafness, when her entire practice is based on establishing trust with patients through careful listening.

For her part, Eliza is stymied by the check-the-box, quick-turnover approach to therapy mandated by modern insurance guidelines. There is no time to listen to patients deeply, practically no time to listen at all. With Nick, unfortunately, she is taking shortcuts as a parent that she does not countenance with her own patients, both forgetting how to listen and practicing the age-old parental dodge of willful blindness.

As the title tells us, Frieda’s Song is steeped in music as well — both listening and playing, and the healing properties of both. Her song, by the way, is Mendelssohn’s “Lost Happiness,” part of his Songs without Words. Frieda is able to recapture some of her lost happiness in the success she has with her Chestnut Lodge practice.

For Eliza and Nick, recapturing the equilibrium in their relationship demands hard truths and a very literal trial by fire.

Campbell delivers a compelling story filled with captivating, humane, and thoroughly human characters. It’s intriguing to realize that Campbell was herself a psychotherapist practicing in Rockville, who lived close enough to the grounds of the sanatorium to be awakened by sirens and the smell of smoke the night it burned down in 2009.

And, not only had she studied Fromm-Reichman’s Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy early in her career, she later realized that Frieda died in her Rockville cottage the same day that Campbell, her parents, and her brother moved into their new Rockville home in 1957. It’s as though Frieda were making sure that Campbell would be the one to tell her story, knowing that she would be in very capable hands.

Tags: book review, historical fiction, literary fiction, new release