The Treatment - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571197612 ISBN 13: 9780571197613

Synopsis

Jake Singer, an anxious young English teacher at a prestigious New York prep school, is heading for a life of personal despair and professional mediocrity. Recently abandoned by his girlfriend, disgusted with his own neurasthenic idling, and emotionally paralysed by a case of the vapours, he embarks of a course of psychoanalysis with a black-bearded, bodybuilding Cuban-Catholic Freudian whose accent and tactics are worthy of the Spanish Inquisition. Dr Ernesto Morales is a therapist from hell, a man who wields his sarcasm like a machete in the slash-and-burn process he calls interpretation - otherwise known as the Treatment. Then Jake meets socialite-widow Allegra Marshall, and as he bounces from the couch to Allegra's bed in the allegedly real world and back again, his life takes on the eerie, overdetermined quality of an analytic session.The Treatment is a brilliantly conceived, hilarious and very sexy book - a stunning first novel.

About this title

Review

At 32, Jake Singer is trapped inside not only his own thoughts but also those of his bizarre, hectoring psychiatrist, a "madman privateer for whom conservative Freudianism was merely a flag of convenience." In between his thrice- weekly skirmishes with the malaprop-slinging Dr Morales, Jake does manage to carry on: he teaches at Coventry, a New York City private school, and has a small trust fund and an adequate Upper West Side apartment. Yet the protagonist of Daniel Menaker's first novel is increasingly alone. He hasn't seen his doctor father in four years, his mother died when he was six, and his most recent girlfriend left him. "I wasn't so crazy that I didn't know how boring my plight would be to most people," he later realizes. "Even the banality of evil is outstripped by the banality of anxiety neurosis." In fact, there's nothing remotely banal about Jake's anxiety, which Menaker makes both very real and very, very funny.

Though Dr. Morales is dead-on about his patient's inertia, his curious method gives the term "critical care" (not to mention "shrink wrap") new meaning. Indeed, Jake and his doctor's hostilities are both hilarious and deeply painful, skidding between progress and "emotional vivisection". Is the foul-mouthed, foul-minded Morales a sport of psychiatric nature, or is he on the right track? Neither patient nor reader will ever be quite sure, though Jake does come out of his long slump, inheriting the responsibility for his own life--and those of several others.

The Treatment bristles with comic energy and risky shifts, but also with something increasingly rare in contemporary fiction--tenderness. Menaker, unlike his protagonist, seems unafraid of emotion and has a perfect ear for the momentary exchange that simultaneously reveals and conceals all. He can also dish up epigrams with the best of them. Jake turns Wallace Stevens's hieratic pronunciamento into a surprising home truth: "If death is in fact the mother of beauty, she never spends any time with her kids." Any reader interested in the fresh pleasures of language, character and sharp social landscaping should look no further. The Treatment is both a merry novel about loss and a melancholy fiction about the pleasures of intimacy-- sexual, familial and, of course, therapeutic.

Review

Christopher Lehman-Haupt"The New York Times"Charming and tender-hearted.

Edition details

• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571197612
• ISBN 13: 9780571197613
• Binding: Paperback