A Seriocomic Fairy Tale
BROWN, ROSELLEN
A Seriocomic Fairy Tale The Treatment By Daniel Menaker Knopf. 276 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Before and After," "Cora Fry's Pillow Book" Even in these skeptical...
...Jake's dream woman, Allegra, is a recent widow with two adopted children, one of whom she is in danger of losing inacustody challenge...
...In The Treatment, the tangent (which turns out, if a reader is permissive about the point of view, not to be a tangent) is a series of sections that suddenly cut away from Jake's intimate, chatty confessional to the unhappy saga of a working-class woman in the Berkshires...
...The woman whose star-crossed love life we seem to be learning about in what could be (but isn't, quite) Jake's reconstruction, is the little girl's real mother...
...It doesn't take long to realize that we are entering, via the rear door, a life that will intersect in an utterly unpredictable way with Jake's: If he's going to be the unlikely prince in this fairy tale, he will have to commit an act of bravery and loyalty to his princess, full of pratfalls and almost occult coincidences...
...Which is a great lesson...
...Is Dr...
...Like Allegra's, her history has been marked by death and disappointment...
...Morales, "You know, it's a genuine relief and refuge to come here to see you, instead of the torture session it used to be...
...When Jake speaks warmly of his new love, Morales complains: "I heard no irony, no skepticism...
...But he internalizes enough of his unorthodox mentor's caveats so that the no-win tapes continue playing when he's out of earshot...
...Destructively bent on creating his own creature...
...He was a madman privateer for whom conservative Freudianism was merely a flag of convenience, and I was just trying to keep him at a distance as I planned my escape," the young man announces after having made it safely to the other side...
...Instead, having performed the princely duty of saving his damsel's family, he ponders the serious import of chance, both good and bad, and the resonance of death in his life and the lives of everyone he is close to...
...Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Before and After," "Cora Fry's Pillow Book" Even in these skeptical pre-millennial days it is apparently possible to write a contemporary fairy tale in which a neurotic New York thirty-something overcomes his anxieties, marries a rich, gorgeous and decent woman, reconciles with his estranged father, advances up the professional ladder with no loss of integrity, yet manages to keep enough of his sense of humor and existential angst to remain recognizable to the rest of us...
...And he certainly "functions" far better than he could when he came to the analyst with his life in shambles...
...If you were an upstanding comedian, the owdience would oblige you very quickly to sit down...
...Overzealously committed to his rough and tumble method of patient abuse...
...Only occasionally does Menaker cram a few too many of Morales' verbal infelicities into a paragraph so that he sounds a bit too much like Desi Arnaz at his daffiest: "Oh, Mr...
...In fact, without (one hopes) the torture part, that sounds remarkably like a definition of adulthood —when we stop measuring our behavior by our parents' lights we become ourselves...
...Morales is responsible for Jake's astounding success...
...Give or take a few cavils (too many conveniently symbolic dreams, even in this Freudian landscape...
...At the moment she is in unwilling thrall not to a mad analyst but to the only caricature in the book, a villainous upper-crust WASP lawyer who, just in case we lose the English Leather scent of his caddishness, knocks around his fiancee, packs a pistol and—What the hell, Menaker must have thought, piling it on—is an anti-Semite for good measure...
...Not for nothing has the novel been called a loose and baggy monster...
...Singer...
...Menaker's sly appropriation of the givens of analysis—with every statement parsed for its hidden assumptions, every shred of anger threshed into full-blown hostility or resistance—is effective because it is an exaggeration of the real thing tweaked into absurdity by Morales' heavy-handedness...
...The fairy godfather who aids and abets Jake Singer in his reluctant march toward maturity—Jake would call it breathing down his neck—is certainly larger than life, if not exactly otherworldly...
...This may have turned out well, he seems to be saying, but let's not get carried away: angst-ridden once, angst-ridden forever...
...For all his ironic charm, a whole novel in Jake's head would have become rather airless...
...And it is how unfunny Morales gets when his little problem with English usurps stage center...
...If the doctor had his way, theirs would be the truly interminable relationship Freud warned of...
...This thriller plot, complete with salvation at the hands of an ally providentially provided with a rifle to hold on the villain at a crucial moment, is engaging and, in the spirit of the book, both antic and wholly serious at the same time...
...I must tell you that I am nearly in the professional equivalent of despair...
...Finally, Jake tallies up that fortune, however fleeting, and announces to Dr...
...Morales desperate to avoid desertion...
...Every time Jake seems to be making progress, Morales skillfully recasts his patient's decisiveness as impulsiveness and warns him that "in your heart of hearts the motive is still your anger and your rebellion—to show me...
...some vaporous philosophizing about fiction), Daniel Menaker has ventured into what is usually dead earnest territory and spun it into a seriocomic confection...
...Improbable it may be, but as delightfully dished up by short-story writer and ex-New Yorker editor Daniel Menaker in his first novel, The Treatment, convincing enough and studded with pleasures...
...Singer, I am disappointed that after one year of our work together you are still capable of feeling so subservient to me," Morales tells him, then does what he can to keep his foot, metaphorically speaking, on his patient's neck...
...In addition to demanding the power to hector and dictate Jake's every move, Dr...
...He is a bulky, black-bearded, malaprop-ridden Cuban psychoanalyst named Ernesto Morales who, though he describes himself as "the last Freudian," avidly breaks every rule of the Master, starting with the most basic creed of anyone in the business of laying on hands: "First do no harm...
...This is how unfunny you are as you try to esquirm away...
...You would have rotten tomatoes dripping down about your face as the hooker came out from the wings and yanked you off the stage by your scrawny neck...
...The Treatment is more nourishing than the sweetness of its happy ending suggests, and far more tart...
...For whom, though, does the dependency exist...
...Although the transition to this sober and sensitively felt third person voice is a little bumpy, it is a worthy gamble...
...Since there are no controlled experiments in therapy, who can say whether Dr...
...I've fallen so far short of your goals for me for so long that I've learned that I have to make do with the best I can do...
...Morales gives him investment advice, salivates over every report of his sexual activity, demanding the most salacious details, and rails against him whenever he exhibits signs of actually making progress...
...Such melancholy is a familiar style, not easily overcome by good fortune...
...that it is my duty to try to accommodate this unconscious plea to remove you once again from the tracks you have tied yourself down to, as the train whose freight may well not include your own best interests bears down upon you...
...that you do not need me as much as you in fact do need me...
...Whichever—why not all three?—this healer who is determined not to let his patient get well is wonderfully funny...
...With or without his blessing, his son grows up...
...Morales, that "emotional brick wall," is a father in a fright wig...
Vol. 81 • June 1998 • No. 8
