Group: Six People in Search of a Life
by Paul Solotaroff
Allen Lane, £18.99, pp339

In Ethan Coen's book of short stories, Gates of Eden, a private investigator with a pressing problem resorts to an intensive course of therapy. As he lies on the couch and obediently rummages through his earliest memories, the analyst, much to his frustration, does nothing other than lend an ear. Isn't this guy, marvels the PI, supposed to do something besides sit back and draw pay?

Charles Lathon, the therapist at the centre of Paul Solotaroff's Group: Six People in Search of a Life, could hardly be accused of sitting back and drawing pay. The Lathon plan is nothing if not exacting: under his tutelage and over the course of 10 months, six New York professionals are asked to take to take a "three-step" route back to happiness through group counselling.

Working together and "under no constraint to mind their manners", they are charged with nailing down their problems, making a start on transforming their lives and proceeding to what Lathon promises is "serious fun". What brings these people to group therapy are "the quotidian problems and concerns of affluent, midlife adulthood": Sara has a mental block around men; Peter is terminally lacking in confidence; Lina is going through a difficult divorce; Dylan is a drinker recovering from a string of tragedies; Jack is a spendthrift and Rex just wants to stop living the high life and settle down.

Solotaroff has worked all of this up into a compelling period piece. His is a suggestive piece of reportage, skilfully capturing the dynamic of group activity and measuring its pace against the unique rhythms of contemporary New York: its noise, its banter, the abruptness of the way its seasons change.

The problem with his account is that, lacking any critical distance from proceedings, it takes too much at face value. It never occurs to Solotaroff - a satisfied former patient of Lathon's - to question the assumptions behind group discussion, nor to wonder at the way in which these six, seemingly bereft of any intimacy in their private life, can find it so easily within the enclosure of a therapeutic relationship.

Lathon is enigmatic and a smooth talker, but much of what he dispenses is nothing more than homespun wisdom. When Lathon assures one client: "You are who you are and you do the best you can", the reader wishes him to reply: "Thanks for the tip."

A more serious criticism which might be levelled at Lathon's method is his peculiar and unarticulated understanding of human nature. The claim made here is that each patient has a right to be freed from "hijacked narratives", that recovering distant memories has the potential to solve problems in the here and now, and that each can achieve happiness by remaking the jigsaw of their own life story.

Nowhere is there any appreciation of the complexity of memory and the role which it plays within human consciousness. Lathon's approach threatens to make biography and accumulated experience more of a burden than an asset. Worse, its suggestion that wading through the murky backwaters of memory can solve complex life problems risks obscuring more promising avenues for individual development.

One of the most dramatic episodes of the book has Rex, whose lack of emotion has made him the black sheep of the group, suddenly lose patience with his colleagues: "You can't accept that there's other ways to do this - to reap the gain, without grovelling in the pain...obviously, there's a code of what's acceptable here, and I fall outside it."

Rex might be on to something, but Solotaroff does little to follow it up. When, in an epilogue, he recounts Lathon's subsequent fall from grace and his dispatch to see a therapist of his own, it comes as no surprise that the ironic possibilities are lost on him. Instead, it merely reinforces him in his pat belief that "It's good to talk."

Despite all its flaws, Group deserves to be read. In years to come, anthropologists may come to view the counselling ritual as a curiosity of turn-of-the-century etiquette. This book, whatever its evasions, looks likely to feature as a primary source.