The treatment

Jake Singer, an anxious young English teacher at a prestigious New York prep school, is heading for a life of personal despair and professional mediocrity. Recently abandoned by his girlfriend, disgusted with his own neurasthenic idling, and emotionally paralysed by a case of the vapors, he embarks on a course of psychoanalysis with a black-bearded, bodybuilding Cuban-Catholic Freudian whose accent and tactics are worthy of the Spanish Inquisition. Dr Ernesto Morales is a therapist from hell, a man who wields his sarcasm like a machete in the slash-and-burn process he call interpretation - otherwise known as the Treatment. Then Jake meets socialite-widow Allegra Marshall, and as he bounces from the couch to Allegra's bed in the allegedly real world and back again, his life takes on the eerie, overdetermined quality of an analytic session. Daniel Menaker's comic genius is matched and deepened by profound compassion, and by the wistful sadness that animates his wit. The Treatment is a stunning first novel.