The Parts Left Out by Thomas Ogden London:  Karnac Books; 2013;  199 pp.

The Parts Left Out is utterly heartbreaking, desperately sad, and unflinchingly brutal in its rendering of the truth. I cannot just yet get past the feeling of being paralyzed and consumed by the blatant truth that there is a kind of brokenness in things and humans that can never be fixed. There is no glue for the brokenness that results from a betrayal of the heart — the betrayal of the covenant we make with the other in our nascent innocence to trust, love, cherish, and protect.

I approached Tom Ogden's debut novel with curiosity and trepidation. I was not sure that I wanted one of my most favorite psychoanalytic writers to be a writer of novels! I was afraid that I would not recognize his voice or that the psychoanalyst in me might lose him. On the other hand, I was equally afraid I would recognize him too much, which I worried might make the novel awkward or strained in an academic kind of way. I just could not put the two together in my mind. I did not read more than a few pages before I realized that I had to stop looking for Tom; it got in the way of me, the reader of novels, always on the lookout for the next one I can crawl under the covers with and devour. So, my strategy was to read it as if Tom Ogden had not written it. Some farmer wrote it and that was that. Now I could sink my teeth into it!

So this is what I have to say about the “author” of this story that left me so bereft. Number one, he hit it out of the park. Why? Because it is everything a novel should be. It is brief and I like that in a novel these days. Number two, it grabbed hold of me from the very first page and never let me drop until the end when it opened its hand and I shattered into a million pieces.

As I made my way through the story I found that it no longer mattered who wrote it, I just could not put it down, and I marveled as a number of my favorite authors and books floated in and out of my awareness. I found