and from drug to drug to drug, from dysfunctional household to his brother's more tender care and back to isolation again, from quack to paper-pusher—and from breakdown to breakdown. He has been abandoned by his mother, his father has died, and the psychiatric profession as organized by New York State for its dependent citizens has moved its heavy haunches essentially to keep Robert Neugeboren quiet and out of the way. When he shows symptoms, he is punished—though "treatment" would be the word on his chart—with isolation and more drugs for the crime of "non-compliance."

Meanwhile, Jay Neugeboren, caring for his children, working at his craft and at teaching the students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, seems to live on the go and on the phone, trying to coordinate the nightmare "care" his brother receives so that Robert can be more than the sum total of his symptoms—so that he might have a functioning self.

As is so often the case in a crazy household—and Mr. Neugeboren's was: the climate was shaped by a sad, ineffectual father, an often cruel, seductive mother—guilt becomes a leitmotif. After he has moved his mother from a retirement community to a nursing home, Mr. Neugeboren wonders whether he is more comfortable being responsible for his mother than with loving her, or whether he has ever loved her. And he asks himself whether, in caring for her and for Robert and even his children, he is "merely trying to prove (to her? to myself? to the universe?) yet again that I am not the mean and selfish boy she always told me I was." This kind of honesty characterizes Imagining Robert. Such self-examination is woven into the narrative of mistreatment and malpractice, and guilt provides too tempting an invitation for Mr. Neugeboren to decline. He must consider it in terms of his own need for expiation or exorcism or (at least) self-analysis. Inevitably questions of guilt become questions of narrative: Why do I tell this tale? Do I serve, or use, my brother? Does my interest in telling the tale overwhelm my interest in serving my loved one?

Every writer serves his selfish needs. But in the case of this memoir, we deal with a writer who serves himself and who goes on to serve his brother for his brother's sake. He finds him in memory and presents him to us as an infant, as a child, as a clever adolescent. (It is in his teen-age years, when Jay goes to college after the boys have shared the same room and true affection for each other, that Robert begins to disintegrate.) Robert is a person here, and not a case history. Mr. Neugeboren finds his brother's noble moments, his triumphs of wit, the true Robert locked behind the trembling hands, the speeding talk, the frightening outbursts. Jay finds Robert by using his art: he imagines him for us, he makes his incoherent journey into a narrative that is organized and useful. He tells Robert's story, and so, at least in a small and permanent way, he frees him.

At the same time, he frees himself "by acting as if there were two Roberts: the brother I grew up with, and the brother who was now hospitalized." This act of the imagination makes it possible for Mr. Neugeboren to "spend time with Robert without making him feel that he (or I!) was somehow to blame for his fate." So, among the many enlightenments this book offers, there is a double lesson about the imagination and illness. The writer is spurred by a loved one's illness to order the chaos of his experience through writing. But the Jay who is a brother before he is an author is spurred by Robert's illness to re-create his brother—to invoke the imagination on behalf of sanity itself. And Jay Neugeboren therefore must contend with two kinds of guilt—with matters of his daily battle with Robert's illness and Robert himself, and with a writer's guilt about what (and whom) he has written.

The author finds his brother, through daily contention and through his writing. And he finds himself in his love for his brother. Coping with Robert's illness, Mr. Neugeboren himself almost succumbs—he is always shaken by stress and fear, and he comes close at several points to suicide—yet he does endure, and so, remarkably, does Robert. Each man seems to me heroic, in part because I know so much about each in his extremity. Mr. Neugeboren concludes that "knowledge and love often prove to be one." It is a writer's knowledge: he knew what he knew, and then, to save his life and his brother's, he imagined the rest of the truth.

'Oh, Robert,' I say then, 'how did we ever live together in that one small room for all those years?'

'Maybe,' Robert answers, 'we were the same person.'