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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
104 of 119 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Succeeds as a Historical Novel, but not as a Thriller,
By
This review is from: The Interpretation of Murder: A Novel (Hardcover)
THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER is probably the most hyped thriller of the year. This debut novel, which takes place in New York during the summer of 1909, promises an exciting murder mystery where the legendary Dr. Sigmund Freud tries to track down a killer of a young society woman.
As a thriller, I must admit this novel really disappointed me. Freud is not a central character in this book at all. Instead, this novel features a large number of characters, and author Jed Rubenfeld keeps shifting the focus from one character to another. As a result, none of the characters are fully developed and many of them end up as slightly cartoonish. In particular, I was heavily displeased with how Dr. Carl Jung was portrayed in this novel. Rubenfeld portrays Jung as a thoroughly unlikable person, a borderline psychopath with virtually no redeemable qualities whatsoever. Freud, by contrast, is portrayed as a virtual saint. Although I am not an expert on either man, I seriously doubt that these are fair and accurate portrayals of what these men were really like. In the end, the large number of one-dimensional characters made this novel a somewhat sterile experience. I did not find this book the least bit emotionally engaging, which is a fatal problem for any thriller. In order to be thrilled by a book, I have to care for the people inside it. That did not happen with THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER. I was also highly disappointed by the ending of this novel, when Rubenfeld reveals who the murderer is, and how the crime was committed. This is, quite simply, one of the most convoluted and unbelievable explanations for a crime that I have ever read. This book has an abnormally large number of plot twists at the end, but none of them were the least bit credible. This book is further burdened by numerous subplots that do little to advance the story, most notably a rather dull subplot invovling a conspiracy to block Freud's lectures at Clark University. This subplot, which Rubenfeld openly admits has no basis in historical fact, has a remarkably anti-climactic ending. I wish this subplot had been eliminated, since it only serves to distract the reader from the much more interesting murder mystery. So why read this book? First of all, Rubenfeld does an excellent job of recreating Manhattan in the year 1909. He obviously did a great deal of research for this book, and it shows on almost every page. I enjoy historical novels, and I found the level of historical detail in this book to be very impressive. I really felt like I transported to another place, and I thoroughly enjoyed the trip. Second, this novel also serves as a very interesting introduction to the theories of Sigmund Freud. I have never studied psychology in depth. Despite this fact, I thought Rubenfeld did a good job making Freud's ideas understandable, largely through a series of dialogues between Freud and other characters. This novel made me more interested in Freud and his psychology, which I'm sure was Rubenfeld's intention. In short, this book largely flops as a thriller. But I thought it was a decent historical novel, with a lot of material to stimulate the intellect. Rubenfeld deserves credit for writing something this ambitious, although he does not completely succeed. I therefore give this novel a mild recommendation.
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rubenfeld off to a great start!,
By
This review is from: The Interpretation of Murder: A Novel (Hardcover)
I don't especially consider myself a fan of historical fiction. But every now and then I stumble upon a novel that's purely entertaining. The Interpretation of Murder is one such novel, and I have to say that the depiction of New York in 1909 was my favorite part of the book. The city itself is like a character!
It's clear that debut novelist Rubenfeld did his research. Not just about the city, but also about his famous characters. The novel is set during the one and only visit of Sigmund Freud to America. Apparently, for the rest of his life Freud referred to Americans as "savages" and spoke disparagingly of the US. It's a true historical mystery, because no one knows what may have happened while Freud was here that so soured the man on this country and its people. In the mystery of this book, Freud visits America with his desciple Carl Jung and gets involved with a murder. The psychologists--along with a fictional counterpart, Dr. Stratham Younger--are asked to consult on the case. Amazingly, Rubenfeld has stolen great chunks of the character's dialog from their real life writing and correspondence, lending a verisimilitude to their psychobabble. While the doctors are analyzing everyone they encounter, the case is being solved by Dr. Younger and wet-behind-the-ears Detective Littlemore. Others have gone into the plot in more detail, and as convoluted as the story is, there doesn't seem to be much point in me doing it again. And that may be the novel's biggest flaw. The many, many twists and reversals in this psychological who-done-it keep you turning the pages at a lightning pace, but the final denouement takes nearly 50 pages to explain what really happened! That's a lot of 'splaining! It's a very convoluted story and in the end may stretch your credulity. Be that as it may, this novel is well worth reading. I felt like a time machine had taken me back to the NY of 1909. It was just wonderful and fascinating--and this again from a non-history buff. Plus, Detective Littlemore is one of my favorite characters I've encountered in quite some time. I would LOVE to see him again! And I even feel I learned something, quite painlessly, about the psychological theories of Jung and Freud. I really hope Rubenfeld, a professor of law, returns to fiction again.
28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
a soulless and silly story,
This review is from: The Interpretation of Murder: A Novel (Hardcover)
This book has been deceptively promoted as a mystery and one in which Freud (in America in 1909 to deliver a lecture at a university) helps to solve a murder. This book is neither of those things! There is no crime-solving in this story: the murderer simply confesses. Freud does not become involved in the murder investigation, focused as he is on averting a potential cancellation of his lecture due to American controversy over his theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Freud's contribution to the book consists of his supplying New York's mayor a professional referral to one Dr. Streatham Younger, an American psychiatrist and narrator of this story who is attracted to Freud's theories. Younger takes up the referral and attempts to apply Freud's approach to the treatment of a young lady's sudden speech paralysis that has followed an attack upon her by someone who may or not also be the murderer in the police investigation.
The clunky prose and dialogue of this book create a thoroughly unbelievable story that provides readers no sense of early 20th century life beyond a few historical facts and place names. Yes, Brooklyn Bridge is being built when Freud arrives in America. There is social competition between aristocratic families, uh-huh. It's a pre-car era with horse-drawn carriages,yeh-yeh. Without these bald data and the fact that Freud did actually visit the United States at that time, the events of this story could be occurring in any urban area where English is spoken and at any time between the late 1800's and 1940. New York City of the pertinent period is not well sketched. In this story, it appears as little more than a cardboard box into which the author tosses his considerations of Shakespeare and psychoanalysis, and his preference for Freud's constructs over Jung's. The author hasn't bothered to flesh out his location; the reader must rely upon whatever pertinent historical images happen to reside in his own mental archive to give the story's setting any visual stability. Flat, dry and embarrassingly naive dialogue that never moves beyond the confines of the book's purposes stops the characters from sounding natural. They speak and behave like puppets appointed to the author and, just as the prose does, give us no sense of how people spoke, thought and behaved in their era. They speak exactly as people do now, a hundred years later! Poor dialogue seals the emptiness of this story. Respected as one of America's most elegant legal writers, Rubenfeld hasn't shown in this his first novel that he has the ability to blend daily life with a story's specific goal. This story falls so short of being credible as a result of this that I can't help wonder why and how it came to be published, let alone touted as the thriller of this summer -or any other. It was an unmitigated waste of my reading time.
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