Daniel Menaker is author of “The Treatment,” a hilarious new novel about an overbearing Cuban psychoanalyst and his tortured schoolteacher patient Jake Singer. For 20 years, Menaker was senior editor at The New Yorker, and today he is senior literary editor at Random House, where he gained renown for editing “Primary Colors,” by Anonymous. Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor spoke with Menaker while he was passing through Chicago recently:
Q. When did you write this novel? There are so many historical references–to Nixon, Cuba and even adoption battles like the one over “Baby Jessica.”
A. I wrote four stories that appeared in The New Yorker in the early ’90s. . . . The fourth story appeared in ’95. I was going to work at Random House, but I took three months off between The New Yorker and Random House, and I figured out what I was going to do (with the book), and I did a little of it. And then I took a year off (from writing the book) to learn my job as an editor. And then in the nooks and crannies in ’95 and ’96, I wrote the rest of the book.
I won’t speak to its quality, but if it had the quality of the Amarillo phone book, I would be very proud of myself, simply for having done it. I will brag about that. Not about the book. But I really can’t believe that I did it, but I did it.
Q. The feelings surrounding the death of a family member seem to fill your work.
A. Well, my mother lived until I was 52, so that’s not it. There’s this thing, “Give me a child until he is 6 . . .” Jake had his mother until he was 6. She died then. I don’t know exactly what that means. It wasn’t as if he was deprived at the most tender age. Probably, I wanted to have him be more alone–so having no mother and an estranged father seemed to make him alone.
But probably the point of comparison, autobiographically, is the death of my own brother when I was 26. It’s a very different circumstance, but I know what it feels like to be in an immediate family where somebody dies, and have written about it, both fiction and non-fiction. We all usually find ways to feel guilty about terrible things that happen. Some of us in a minor way. Some of us in a kind of chronic way. And I think that Jake seems not to have worked through this death of his mother. He still feels somehow responsible for her.
Q. I note that you didn’t put Jake on Prozac.
A. There wasn’t any. Don’t forget, anxiety neurosis, if there is such a thing, was a very different kettle of fish in the ’70s. . . . I mean, there was the psychotherapeutic model; Freud or neo-Freud or semi-Freudianism still held sway, and it was thought that both anxiety and depression (could be talked through). Now, that doesn’t seem to be so fashionable. And now it seems to be pretty much psycho-pharmacological, which Freud predicted, very astutely, and a mixture of psycho-pharmacology and talking. . . . I have a sense that full-scale, classical analysis is going on a little more than people think, for those who can afford it. But it’s not an open topic of conversation as it used to be in the ’70s, when it came only after real estate and movies.
Q. Is psychoanalysis a sort of New York thing?
A. I think that may be, indeed, part of it. But it may not be all of it. And I bet you’d be surprised, as I have been since this book has come out, at how many people actually are in therapy. People who talked to me about it who would not have mentioned it otherwise seem to take this as a license to say they are in therapy or they were in therapy or they are thinking about it.
A lot of people, especially in a work-ethic society, don’t have a whole lot of time to get the intimacy and the sort of candor that they need from their family members. A lot of people are on the go, and they will take an hour to bare their souls. Sometimes there are perfectly functional people who actually need to talk to someone in the oldest way, the oldest model of psychotherapy of rabbis and priests. You go and you say what’s bothering you.
Q. You edited short stories at The New Yorker and now you edit novels. Is that different?
A. I (still work with) short stories, . . . but most of them arrive edited, so that I don’t actually edit them. When I do actual editing, it’s generally of novels.
(William) Shawn and The New Yorker in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s manufactured editors. Once you edit, you can edit. If you know how to ask questions when you are reading texts, that’s all you need. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a grocery list.
Shawn set the standard, for me, for it. Which is that you read like a child. Like a very sophisticated, smart child who didn’t mind asking what seemed to be naive questions. And all editors have to do is simply, whenever they don’t understand something, they have to say so. Or, more important than that, especially in fiction, whenever they think that a writer has departed from his or her voice, they have to say so. When they think something is inconsistent with the rest of the book, whether it’s narratively or tonally. That’s trickier. But even in non-fiction literary writing you get the same matter of tone.
Q. Are the trash books crowding out the serious books?
A. No. But I think it takes more and more energy to keep the space for the serious books. I think it’s hard to do it, and I think the pressures to work on big stuff are considerable. I have been asked to work with Michael Eisner, which I am doing. Jonathan Kellerman, which I am doing. And Daniel Silva, the thriller writer, which I am doing. But I think maybe now I am going to stop and say, “Now I want to do my literary stuff.”
Q. Are you completely bored by conversation about “Primary Colors”?
A. No. No, I’ll never be bored by that. It was amazing fun and an amazing surprise. I didn’t know who it was up until half an hour before the press conference. I would have been surprised if it was anybody but Joe (Klein). I continue to draw energy from this project because I continue to be outraged by the amount of outrage there was about what Joe did. I cannot understand it to this day. Maybe you can explain it.
Q. People feel outraged when they have been had.
A. See, if he lied to his friends, that’s a problem. That’s his business, he has to straighten it out. If he got in trouble with his colleagues, that’s also his business. And even if he initiated aggressive denials, that’s kind of dumb, maybe. He shouldn’t have done that. But no one’s life was at stake, national security wasn’t at stake, and it’s my distinct impression–being kind of a strangulated Freudian–that the journalistic community that got so angry, called him a liar, called him corrupt, this, that and the other thing . . . I think that’s absolutely pure projection. I think it’s like going to the multiplex and watching eight screens of projection.
But most of the people who did the hitting have certainly engaged in practices that the ordinary public would and does find questionable. Joe simply is used as a punching bag, I think. And I have absolutely no vested interest in this anymore because we have lost his next book. So I am not even speaking as his editor. This is just intellectual. I make believe I don’t get it, but I think I do get it. I think I understand that it’s pot and kettle. And this is going back three years . . . but you have to understand, it was amazing, the invective. Especially in New York. To watch what happened was amazing.
