The Treatment [Paperback]

Daniel Menaker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1999

Jake Singer is an anxious young schoolteacher in New York--barely on speaking terms with his father, recently abandoned by his girlfriend, and heading for a life of compromise and mediocrity at a prestigious New York prep school. Emotionally paralyzed by a case of the vapors, he embarks on a course of psychoanalysis with a maniacal Cuban-Catholic Freudian--Dr. Ernesto Morales, therapist from hell, a man who wields his sarcasm like a machete in the slash-and-burn process he calls interpretation. Morales's accent and tactics are worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, and Jake is just trying to keep him at a distance while he plans his escape. But when he meets socialite widow Allegra Marshall, and finds himself upwardly mobile in the Manhattan of serious money and glamour--as he bounces from the couch to Allegra's bed in the allegedly real world and back again--his whole life begins to take on the eerie, overdetermined quality of an analytic session.
While he struggles to resolve the psychic grudge he bears his parents, Jake becomes embroiled in another parental conflict--of a different kind and with even higher stakes--that may threaten the future of one of Allegra's adopted children. And if from his horizontal vantage point on Morales's couch Jake's world has started to feel suffocatingly predictable, life beyond the couch makes it clear that the world's true organizing principles are chance and accident: that the only indisputable axiom is happenstance.
With wit, grace, and style, Daniel Menaker has written a hilarious novel about coming to terms with life's unruliness, about trying to extract meaning from chaos. Jake gets the Treatment--not just from Morales but from the world--andhis notion of unending improvement collides with the possibility of taking pleasure when and where he can, and learning to accept love in place of perfection.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At 32, Jake Singer is trapped inside not only his own thoughts but also those of his antic, hectoring psychiatrist, a "madman privateer for whom conservative Freudianism was merely a flag of convenience." In between his triweekly 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 antic 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 ruffles with comic energy and risky shifts, but also with something increasingly rare in 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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Menaker's clever, very funny and surprisingly tender first novel is a triumphant satire of Freudianism gone amok, a touching love story and a quintessential picture of New York life. In the annals of intellectual urban existence at the end of the 20th century, 32-year-old Jake Singer's lonely, anxiety-filled daily routine qualifies as an existential hell. Just passed over as head of the English department at Coventry, a prestigious Manhattan prep school, estranged from his cold father, still subconsciously guilty about his mother's death when he was six, unable to connect emotionally with a woman, Jake is locked in combat with the devil in the form of psychiatrist Dr. Ernesto Morales. The black-bearded, Cuban-born, devoutly Catholic Morales has put his personal stamp on the psychoanalytic process that he calls "the treatment": he is aggressively confrontational, vociferously opinionated and invariably accusatory as he hectors Jake in hilariously accented, "flamboyantly Spanished" diatribes designed to keep his patient intimidated. Even when Jake is not being bullied by Morales in person, he hears the doctor's voice in his head, in tandem with his own typically sardonic replies. But Jake's life undergoes an astonishing transformation when he meets wealthy socialite widow Allegra Marshall at a Coventry fund-raiser, and the two?beautiful WASP and "neurotic secular atheist Jew"?begin a passionate affair. Fate brings them into contact with a young woman living in the Berkshires (this gives Menaker another chance to depict the residents and terrain of his memorable collection of short stories, The Old Left). In a series of (perhaps too convenient) coincidences, Jake initiates acts of courage, reconciliation and healing, meanwhile achieving his own fulfillment. Menaker's supple command of language, his witty turns of phrase and riposte-sharpened dialogue are informed by an ironic eye, a wryly compassionate understanding of human frailties and a skeptical but also guardedly hopeful appraisal of the human condition. (June) FYI: Menaker, formerly a senior editor at the New Yorker, is a senior editor at Random House.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Pocket (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671032631
• ISBN-13: 978-0671032630
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #315,017 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Daniel Menaker has been a part of America's life of letters for almost forty years. As a writer, he has met and talked to thousands of people about their work and their lives. His own writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Slate.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Witty and satifying, but somewhat flawed., June 2, 1999

By 

JT (Riverdale) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Treatment (Paperback)

Menaker has an original concept, and a good handle on the higjly implausible, but no less hilarious character of Dr. Morales, the eccentric, Spanish therapist treating Jake Singer, the story's narrator. Jake is in his early thirties, a teacher at a local Manhattan prep school and suffering from defeatism and despair. The author never really delves into the cause of this dubious psychosis, other than having Morales connect it to the early death of Jake's mother and his estrangement from his father, and the overall book is diminished slightly for it. On the other hand, watching Morales obnoxiously push Jake to overcome his problems, while seemingly, paradoxically, encouraging them, is the meat of the novel, funny, touching and provocative. Is Dr. Morales really trying to cure Jake, or is he actually dependent on him, as Jake sometimes thinks, and reluctant to declare him finished with the treatment? As Jake begins to achieve success, both professionally and in his love life, Morales seems more determoned than ever to keep Jake in treatment. Jake wonders, as does the reader, if Morales might be living vicariously though him, especially when he insists on intimate details of every sexual act Jake and his new lover perform. The verbal fencing between therapist and patient is always witty and often revealing, and raises interesting questions about the nature of therapy and of the patient/therapist dynamic. Menaker graciously declines to give any concrete evidence concerning Dr. Morale's possibly conflicted motives, which allows the reader to either agree with Jake or not. This reader would have liked to see more of the sessions and their manifestations in Jake's life, and less of the distracting sublot suddenly introduced midway through the book concerning Jake's lover's adopted daughter and her original birth mother. The switch in stories, as well as narrators (from Jake to third person) was disconcerting and not becoming in what was otherwise an intimate and cleverly wrought novel.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Weak ending almost ruined it for me., November 16, 2000

By 

Sara E Kelley (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Treatment (Paperback)

This book realistically and humorously portrays the analyst-patient relationship, although the analyst character, Dr. Morales, is drawn with extreme hyperbole. I disagree with the reviewers who found Jake's constant correction of Dr. Morales's English to be racist. Actually, I think this makes *Jake* look priggish, stubborn, and "resistant," and that that was precisely the author's intention. Unfortunately, although I found this book extremely entertaining, at the end the plot relies too heavily on unbelievable coincidences to wrap things up; it appears that Menaker just couldn't think of a more credible way to get his characters out of the mess he got them into.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Treater approves of The Treatment, February 14, 2002

By 

Donald R. Fleck (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Treatment (Paperback)

I couldn't stop laughing. While Menaker describes an outlandish psychoanalytic treatment that greatly lightened my reading for a few days, at the same time he subtly and accurately shows a patient progressing within it. Or in opposition to it.

Any therapist will enjoy this send-up about "the last Freudian," as will anyone who has spent some time on the couch.