text: Other reviewers have taken pains to outline the "plot" of this baby boomer bodice ripper. Suffice it to say author Kathryn Harrison, scrupulously adhering to some private conviction that "more is better" , offers estrangement between identical twins, loss of a child, incest, paternity confusion, mid-life crisis and spiteful erotomania as it crops up in the life of one understandably confused New York shrink. This reader was aching for the hero, Will, to book himself onto Jerry Springer while feeling immensely shortchanged by lines from Ms Harrison like "It's just...it's...What is it? Will doesn't have a word for what he feels." (Perhaps the character lacks the emotional vocabulary to communicate with the reader: the author, however, should not. In any case, those are lousy, lazy sentences among so many examples.)
  In addition to being insufferably, cartoonishly silly, the book is wounded by a dreary internal structure. Bad things happen to Will-the-shrink, Will then regurgitates them at length to HIS shrink, then buttonholes his wife to regurgitate what happened, what he thinks happened, and what he thinks about what his shrink thinks. 
  As for Ms Harrsion's "famous" sex scenes. They practically lie on their backs, fondling their adverbs and panting for Penthouse approval: "She's unbelievably wet and tight and impossibly, almost unnaturally, slippery."
  "Envy", by the way, is Ms Harrison's 11th book and she should, by now, be getting things more right than wrong
  