Group: Six People in Search of a Life

This fascinating account of a year in group therapy is fortunately short on the platitudes usually found in pop-psychology books. Six New Yorkers — whose names and physical descriptions have been changed — tell their stories in monthly installments that gradually exert the addictive pull of a soap opera. Will the Wall Street whiz with a yen for coke and strippers find a legal way to spend the money he rakes in? Will the alcoholic ex-rock musician land that job scoring a Nickelodeon show? Will the glamorous magazine editor find true love, or continue to sleep around with every video editor and food stylist she bumps into? Solotaroff's prose occasionally borders on the evangelical about the merits of group therapy. Still, Group: Six People in Search of a Life is irresistible stuff — Seinfeld reborn as General Hospital. A-