The Treatment

by Daniel Menaker

Book Overview

Abandoned by his girlfriend, Jake Singer, a young English teacher at a prestigious New York prep school, wallows in a morass of personal despair and professional mediocrity, until he embarks on a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671032631
• ISBN13: 9780671032630
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Treater approves of The Treatment

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.

Comic novel reminiscent of Portnoy's Complaint

This novel is funny, sad, and very moving. The language is wonderful. I do agree with other readers that the book gets somewhat bogged down by the story within the story. The twists and turns at the end make up for it though. The writing style of the subplot is so much inferior to the first person narrative though..it was very strange and a little confusing to figure out what was actually going on. I did tire of the way the narrator corrected Morales english..I thought that bordered on racism and patronizing..but i have to admit I did laugh at a lot of the time. Overall I found the book refreshing and the discussion of the strained relations between son and dad very very moving. Certainly the whole thing was uneven, but it was one of the most adult, entertaining works I"ve read in a long while. I highly recommend this novel.

Witty and satifying, but somewhat flawed.

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.

have a heart

For me, the book gets better the further it gets from the analysis at the beginning. Instead of blaming others and fretting about his little problems, Jake learns to forgive and open up to the world. Menaker writes unusually well about children, as in the scene where Jake reads to Emily. The last sentence is generous, hopeful and attentive to the mysteries that support us.

starts out hilarious, ends up cloying

I agree with many of the other comments: I was tremendously entertained by the beginning of this book. Anyone who has ever been therapy will get a huge kick out of the narrator's metaanalysis of his analysis. His "running commentary" of his therapy sessions (complete with what he imagines the therapist is *really* thinking, what he picks up from tiny nuances of gesture and tone, and how he imagines he himself must sound) is priceless. Unfortunately, I did feel the book gets bogged down in the love story & and the third person interlude that others refer to above. Plus it seemed to me that the psychiatrist became rather one-dimensional by the end--making the book seem like much more of a stereotypical spoof of psychoanalysis than it at first appeared to be.