THE TREATMENT
By Daniel Menaker
Knopf, 269 pages, $23
Sometimes a guitar is just a guitar. At least that’s what Jake Singer thinks when his wealthy wife presents him with a rare Martin Dreadnought guitar she’d been hiding under their bed. The placement and timing of the gift–she presents it when Jake suggests making love–would have provided Jake’s former psychoanalyst with fodder for at least a week’s worth of sessions. But Jake, a headmaster at a private Manhattan school and amateur musician, no longer sees Dr. Ernesto Morales, the vituperative, “Cuban-Catholic Freudian.” Seven years earlier, Jake swam up from the Great Sea of the Unconscious and disobeyed Morales’ advice by marrying a wealthy but emotionally needy widow with two adopted children.
We meet a more timid Jake Singer when the novel opens in the early 1970s, isolated and reminiscent of John Singer, who is the deaf-mute in Carson McCullers’ novel “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” and who may have been part of the inspiration for Jake’s character. Unable to form emotional attachments, Jake still mourns the loss of his mother who died when he was 6. Now in his 30s, Jake struggles with male authority figures, most pointedly his remote cardiologist father and his irascible boss, the Scottish headmaster W.C.H. Proctor. And of course, there’s the mordant Morales. There are no jokes, Morales constantly reminds Jake during his years of therapy, but as Daniel Menaker writes the sessions, the duels between the dramatic Cuban analyst and the rebellious schoolteacher take on an “I Love Lucy” quality. While Jake bemoans his lack of success in work and love, Morales wrestles with the English idiom. Despite his obvious intelligence and broad vocabularly, he regularly accents the wrong syllables in words, mixes metaphors and slaughters colloquialisms. During an especially circuitous session, Morales observes, ” `Now we are like . . .a champster on a wheel,” and later, when Jake expresses doubts a promotion at work, Dr. Morales says, ” `when your lover and I mention a new opportunity for you in your profession, you pull on the reins and get down off the horse and accuse us of jumping over the gun that you have made sure to unload in advance.’ “
Jake may be supine during these sessions, but he’s not unobservant. “I could’ve written a case study about Dr. Morales,” he notes. “About how his habitual throat-clearing got louder as his boredom increased, about how he chronically expressed pity for the rich and famous, about how his voice turned cloyingly sweet when he asked me about sex. About how, as he was charging at my character with lance levelled, I could unhorse him by raising the conversational shield of investments.”
Throughout this incisive, witty novel, Morales and Jake compete for control, both of the therapist-patient relationship and the narrative. Even when Jake isn’t in session, he imagines Morales’ acrid responses in amusing but also disturbing italicized passages.
Despite–or perhaps because of–Morales’ hectoring, Jake begins to apply his astute knowledge of others in crucial situations. During a school basketball game, he inserts himself between a knife-wielding scholarship student and a player from a rival school. He survives with a nicked kidney, and the heroics bode well. Soon Jake becomes a favored teacher and speaker, and at a fundraiser he meets Allegra Marshall, a gorgeous socialite widow with an affinity for “dark and thin” musicians.
But just when Jake begins to make progress, the novel shifts focus, yanking us from the witty, couch-bound repartees to a cast of working-class characters in the Berkshires. There’s a semi-secret connection to Jake (via Allegra and one of her children), but in this sequence the narrative briefly loses some of its edgy exuberance and turns a bit more toward plot.
Fortunately, we return to Morales and his oddly engaging diatribes, though years have gone by. Ronald Reagan is president when Jake finally pays his former therapist a visit, and psychoanalysis is all but eclipsed by “the psychopharmacopoeia which Freud so astutely predicted,” according to Morales. Here, in the final scene between the bilious doctor and teacher, Menaker’s writing transcends even its own vertiginous level of insight: “I am the last Freudian!” Morales proclaims. “I am the last of a line that estretches from Moses to Aristotle through Cicero to our good Lord Jesus Christ and Aquinas and Maimonides and Shakespeare and Montaigne and finally to Freud and then to me. . . . Do you know what trouble the idea of the soul is in, by any remote eeyota of a chance, Mr. Singer?”
