Think how he could have dealt with this. It is the liberal professional talking. But what if Campbell had introduced a twist, had suggested a private horror when the liberal professional encounters someone like this in his own family? That way he could lead into the crack-up as the man begins to doubt the advice and balance he has given others.

The crack-up has moments of what Dr Leavis called the concrete, and what others might call the sense of something actually happening: the London traffic, the faces looming up out of the night, and especially the banality of the tiny texted sentences, which is all the man’s family will have to ponder on after his suicide. E mails, reducing human experience to sludge, hit the authentic tragic note of the 21st century.

But, whatever the book’s merits as a study of depression, I found it difficult to distinguish between the characters for all the supplied detail, and in the end this was fatal. And it was such a good idea.

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