Customer Reviews

The Interpretation of Murder

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I wish I had read other reader reviews before spending my money and time, but mostly my time on this book. The "professional" reviews have got it all wrong, it;s not really very good at all. I am left with the impression that the author is trying to impress us with his knowledge of Shakespeare, his cleverness over Hamlet,his understanding of psychoanalysis, his admiration for Freud/hatred of Jung and his research of old New York. Only the last of these works at all. It's what kept me motivated to finish the book though I do confess to skipping paragraphs about 60% into it. The plot, which is summed up extremely well by a number of the Amazon reviewers has great potential - initially you get really sucked in - but then in the end feel robbed. There are so many threads that don't really ever come together, the dialog in many cases is amateurish,the intertwining of Hamlet gets boring and overall the plot is forced. Basically a dissappointing read.

Book Review:
The Interpretation of Murder
by Jeb Rubenfeld

The Interpretation of Murder was our book club's reading choice for January. We'd taken a couple of months off for the holidays, and several of us had put this book on our Christmas wish lists! Which made it the perfect book for January.

The set-up of the story is very intriguing indeed. This is a historic murder mystery based on true events. Sigmund Freud visited the United States only once and never returned. He had apparently taken quite a dislike to America while he was here, and when he returned to Europe he referred to Americans as "savages." In The Interpretation of Murder, the author creates a story to explain Freud's perceptions.

In a nutshell, it's New York City, c. 1909, and a beautiful out-of-towner has been murdered in an upscale apartment building called the Balmoral (based on a famous NYC building called the Ansonia). The murder coincides with Freud's first trip to America to deliver a lecture at Clark College. Dr. Stratham Younger, a burgeoning Freudian, is called in to psychoanalyze the murderer's second victim, who managed to escape.

It is a very intriguing set-up, and one that piqued all of our interest. But the book is not an unqualified success.

First, the pros. The author has done an excellent job with his research. Many of the details of New York City are very well done, including details about high society at the time (the feud between the Vanderbilts and the Astors). We all enjoyed the details about the mechanical feats of engineering that allowed the Manhattan Bridge to be built. We also liked the details about Gramercy Park (one of us used to live in that neighborhood).

But now the cons. While some of us thought the book moved along at a nice clip, most of us felt it was plodding, with too many things going on. The author is given to lengthy explanations of things like Shakespearean drama and the inner workings of Freudian theory, which lead to a sort of textbook feel. The plot is pretty convoluted, with a bunch of red herrings and subplots that muddy the waters, including one to discredit Freud before he even gets to speak at the university. Several of us had to read the resolution of the mystery several times to "get" it, and two of us gave up on trying to figure it all out.

There are some other disappointments, too. Most of us had been under the impression that Freud himself would be actively investigating the mystery--that's not the case. He's more of an advisor to Dr. Stratham Younger, who isn't very interesting as a narrator. The narration keeps switching back and forth between first person and third, which can work (some of us very much like books with multiple viewpoints) but in this case, it seemed like a mishmash. The portrait of Carl Jung (who accompanied Freud on his trip to the U.S.) seemed really unfair. None of us knew a tremendous amount about Jung, but the portrait of him in the book seems negative in the extreme (though the author says in his afterword that his fictional recreations of Freud and Jung are based on extensive research, which we didn't doubt).

The characters are sort of lifeless, too--no real flesh and blood there, not even the narrator. But the biggest problem we thought was the way the book reads. Freudian psychology has receded quite a bit...it's no longer what's going on in the field of psychology today, which is becoming increasingly focused on the brain and biochemistry. The Interpretation of Murder makes it seem as if Freudian psychology has been the salvation of the field, but we know that it really hasn't been (even though its influence of course cannot be denied). Now we may be wrong about this (none of us are psychologists or trained in that area) but even a casual reading of the popular press tells the common reader that it's all about biopsychology these days, not the Oedipus Complex. So the book feels like much ado about nothing...almost like a historical footnote that is out of touch.

Overall, I can't say that we disliked or hated the book, but many were disappointed in it and felt it did not live up to the hype. We took away from it a sense that the author really does love NYC and did a great job on the research. But as a mystery it leaves a lot to be desired, and in terms of suspense--it's almost nonexistent. Several of us finished it out of a sense of obligation, not because we wanted to. All told, not one of our favorite books, but to be fair, we are just a small group of people and others may love it.

A kaleidoscopic novel in which we constantly shift from one group of people to another and from first-person to third-person narrative. Likewise, there is a constant shift between events and people with a historical basis on the one hand and invented people and an invented murder story on the other. A five-page Author's Note at the back tells us what is historically true, what adjustments have been made to real events and what is pure invention

The setting is New York in 1909, and its physical character and its city politics at that time have been researched in great detail. It is the scene of the murder of one young woman and the attempted murder of another. It is also the scene of the arrival of Freud, who is to give a lecture there and is accompanied by Jung and Ferenczi. The near-victim says she can remember nothing of the incident in which she was nearly murdered; so it is suggested she undergo psychoanalysis by a young American analyst, under some kind of `supervision' by Freud, to help her to recover the memory; so there is both forensic and psychoanalytical detective work being done to solve the crime. Of course I must not give away too much of the plot (I have already laid a false trail in what I have written), even if I were able to summarize its extremely convoluted nature; but we are treated to expositions of psychoanalytic theory which will be illuminating to people who are ignorant of it, but which is sometimes a little mechanical to those who are familiar with it and which has been done with rather more subtlety in some other novels I have read. And it is surely out of character for Freud to have displayed his interpretative skills as a party game with strangers, as he does in one scene. Whether Freud was right in his interpretation of Hamlet plays quite a big part in the story: Rubenfeld clearly sees it as a significant metaphor, though to me it seems rather dragged in, possibly because Rubenfeld is pleased with his own explanation of Hamlet's inability to act, just as he may be with his own version of the Oedipus Complex. Jung's rebellion against Freud and the antagonism that a famous trio of neurologists in New York feel towards psychoanalysis are a second plot, with Freud as the intended victim.

The book uses many techniques of the thriller: there are passages ending in cliff-hanging suspense and there are dramatic - not to say melodramatic - descriptions of sadistic behaviour. False trails, enough to make one's head spin, are ingeniously laid. The book is a page-turner; and fact, semi-fact and fiction are skilfully, if fantastically, interwoven. It is a well-crafted tour de force, but it is not artistic. It lacks all elements of credibility. Perhaps it was all written with tongue in cheek, intended to be a jeux d'esprit; but I am sorry to say it left me cold quite some time before I came to the end.

The author knows about Freud and about Shakespeare. So, it seems, he decided to write a novel to act as a vehicle for his knowledge. This is no basis for any novel writer, least of all a thriller writer. The characters are hollow, there are a zillion plots (not all relevant), the construction is fragmented and amateurish and the dialogue beggars belief:
".......shoot me"
"Very well", said [character] shooting me.
I regret wasting my time in continuing this extrememly and inexplicably hyped novel to its even-worse-than-expected end

I made it only half-way through this book. While not badly written, it didn't hold my interest and was needlessly complicated. I am a psychologist and am very well acquainted with Freud and his colleagues, Ferenczi and Jung. The painful and uninteresting descriptions of analyses were gratuitous. In the cover notes, when you read that the author had done a graduate thesis on Freud, one could see that research was important to him. But are these miniscule details important to readers? Don't authors owe something to them? A poor book!

Jed Rubenfeld's "The Interpretation of Murder" must be the most overhyped bestselling thriller to have been published this past year. Touted as a page turner set in New York about a mysterious murder that took place one summer in the year Dr Freud was invited to deliver a lecture at a university in the Big Apple, the book in fact trades shamelessly on Freud's peripheral involvement in the case and then fails at every step of the way to tell a story that is in any way believable. Sure, the author managed a couple of heart stopping, jaw dropping moments such as when the truth behind Nora's reaction to what she accidentally spied one day isn't what you had imagined, but what finally rubbished the book for me was the incredibly lame denouement - a more desperately contrived ending you would never imagine. The book is an easy read but considering the critical praise it received, I have to count it as a major disappointment !

When I heard of the premise of this novel, I was very interested in it. Historical fiction is not an easy genre to conquer and I was intrigued by this particular author's take on Sigmund Freud and his American visit.

One thing that Rubenfeld does particularly well is his research. Freud is portrayed exactly the way that he is when taught, as an erudite scholar. However, it seems that fiction is something that he needs to work on.

Rubenfeld's descriptions of turn of the century New York City are very pleasing, however his characters are somewhat bloodless, as it is very hard to engage with some of them. Some plot twists are easy to guess and somewhat disappointing when finally borne out. It is a quick read and entertaining if you like Freud or historical fiction. Not the best, but okay.