Death of the Great Man by Peter D. Kramer, Post Hill Press 2023, 416 pages, $18.99.

Providence psychiatrist Henry Farber is the narrative focus of Death of the Great Man, the new novel by Peter Kramer, author of 1993’s bestselling Listening to Prozac.

Dr. Farber, who achieved a certain level of fame years before as a noted sleep specialist, is a quiet, introspective man, and when readers meet him he is still clearly stunned with grief over the cancer death of his wife Miriam just a couple of years before. But when the novel opens, Dr. Farber has a much more pressing problem than grief or professional dissatisfaction: the Great Man has been found face-down, dead in Farber’s consulting room.

Dr. Farber is the book’s narrative focus (he himself would likely scoff at the term “hero”), but the book belongs entirely to the Great Man — it unwinds under his shadow and he pervades every moment in its pages.

Dr. Farber’s wife had died when hospitals overburdened by treating an unnamed ‘plague’ had no room for her, for instance, and readers are told, “When the plague descended, the Great Man preened and boasted and let it spread.”

The country all around Dr. Farber has descended into the Greater Depression because “if you entrust a nation’s economy to an impulsive leader with no care for facts, disaster will follow.”

There are many wonders in Dr. Kramer’s novel, not least the way it consistently substitutes intelligent world-building for easy indignation. This is ultimately so much more than a topical satire that it feels almost insulting even to mention the obvious templates for the Great Man and his illicit second-term seizure of power. Far more than ripped-from-the-headlines outrage, this is an examination of the way thuggish autocracy seeps into every little part of life.

The Great Man had rigged the vote count in the last election, coerced legislatures and judges. “He repeated absurdities until they gained currency.”

And finally, when his political mafia tactics and suicidal tariffs had caused the economy to collapse, the Great Man had declared a state of emergency. He would govern indefinitely over a poorer, coarser and more squalidly transactional nation.

“I wanted life to continue as it had been or, better yet, for time to run backward,” Dr. Farber thinks, surely speaking for most of the U.S.

“Who did not have that wish, in the era of the Great Man? Repeatedly, we proposed compromises. We could live with conditions as they had been a year before, a month before, a day.”

The dead body in the consulting room and the inevitable social and political firestorm that will result prompts Dr. Farber to recall the process by which he was coerced into “consulting” with the Great Man. An innocent will be deported to a war zone if he refuses, but readers are quickly aware that there’s more to Dr. Farber than even such an urgent quid pro quo. As he tells us many times, now that his wife is gone his profession is his bedrock.

“Disappoint a patient, and the sin is mortal,” he thinks. “Provide comfort to a world-destroyer, and the sin is venial,” adding, “I saw this assessment as absurd and, at the same time, I embraced it.”

So Dr. Farber had entered the Great Man’s world, a labyrinth of vicious leg-breakers, iron-eyed opportunists and a remnant of suborned, time-serving institutionalists.

“Those who despised the Great Man and his goals signed on nonetheless to serve the Regime, to get square meals,” Dr. Farber reflects. “How many veteran bureaucrats had, under pressure, undone all they had worked for — in hopes, vain hopes, of averting worse?”

The Great Man’s era is one marked by “contempt for vulnerability” and by an ever-present weaponized paranoia, demonstrated in the barrage of paperwork that accompanies Farber’s new “consultant” position, all of it protected by attorney-client privilege, the one legal protection the Regime had strengthened.

“The Great Man was a huge fan of attorney-client privilege.”

Lurking behind all of this coercion and counter-coercion is the Great Man’s base, a murmuring, violent mob of EverGreats who will tear apart any perceived affront to their leader — and who even their leader very much fears, as the Great Man confesses to Dr. Farber several times. The bulk of the narrative is full of such confessions, wittingly and unwittingly made, as the Great Man (and later his wife) enter into a series of deep, searching conversations with their new “consultant.”

The contrast between the Great Man’s utterly unaware blustering self-incriminating lies and Dr. Farber’s relentless, almost involuntary observational rigor is masterfully done. Readers of these “sessions” will be simultaneously infuriated and unsettled, in ways the events of the last eight years perhaps made them think they no longer could.

Dr. Kramer’s book is a performance Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would have applauded, not only for its thready courage but also for its deadpan moments of dour jest.

“There was little to miss in the Great Man. He had destroyed our democracy. He was responsible for deaths beyond counting,” Dr. Farber thinks at one such point, adding, “On a minor note: he had threatened my family.”

“We worry about truth, you and I, but surely beauty is a value too,” one character ponders. “There is beauty in a story that meets the moment’s needs.”

In an odd and recondite way, Dr. Kramer has crafted a tale that meets the moment’s needs. Here’s hoping it’s not prescient.