'Doctor Pluss,' by Rob Couteau.

Rob Couteau Doctor Pluss

Ordering info

Critical acclaim for
Rob Couteau's novel,
Doctor Pluss:

"Intellectual freshness, richness and potency ..." "[An] impressively creative writer, whom [Barney] Rosset urged me to review."
-- Jim Feast, author of Neo Phobe (with Ron Kolm), from his Evergreen Review essay on Doctor Pluss and Collected Couteau.

"Amazingly beautiful, haunting prose. It's a great book."
-- Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno,

author of:
An Invisible Spectator:
A Biography of Paul Bowles
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

and
The Continual Pilgrimage:
American Writers in Paris
(Grove Press / Bloomsbury)

Rob Couteau's Doctor Pluss is a work of fiction based on actual dialogues with schizophrenic patients, diabolically 'sane' psychotherapists, and well-meaning yet unerringly destructive social workers. It chronicles the descent of an eccentric, sardonic, and witty psychiatrist into what appears to be a state of complete madness. Written in an evocative, lyrical prose style, the tale achieves a magical life of its own as the narrative twists, turns, and accelerates along with the doctor's free fall into the self. Doctor Pluss demonstrates how ideation and speech may be surrealistically transformed into a 'broken language' delirium, which, despite its strangeness, remains eerily accessible.

Couteau was born in Brooklyn, NY, and studied fine arts at the State University of New York, at New Paltz. In the mid-1980s he was director of a nonprofit agency that provided advocacy, housing, and counselling for former psychiatric patients, in New York City. In 1985 he won the Fourth Annual North American Essay Award, a competition open to writers throughout North America and sponsored by the American Humanist Association. He has published poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews in such publications as The Alembic; Anima; Arete; Bloomsbury Review; Cadillac Cicatrix; Chrysalis; Colere; Confluent Educational Journal; Croton Review; The European; Footwork; The Garden State; The Hawaii Pacific Review; Heavenbone; The Humanist; The Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy; Lapis; Lift Magazine; New Leaves Review; The Paris Voice; Passager; Quantum; Raintaxi; Rockhurst Review; Spring; Venice Magazine; Versitude; West Hills Review; White Pelican Review; Xanadu; and Z Miscellaneous.

After living in Paris for twelve years, he returned to the U.S. in December 2000. He currently resides in upstate New York.

Buy Doctor Pluss
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Doctor Pluss is available
at the following libraries:

NEW YORK:
- Elting Library, New Paltz
- Port Washington Public Library


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Updated: 26 April 2010

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