A man and his shrink: The Treatment

Remembering now what annoyed me when first read Daniel Menaker's The Treatment when it was new circa 1998 - as it shifted from comic story about a 32-year-old NYC prep-school English teacher and the course of his treatment with a very funny and abrupt and insightful Cuban-emigre analyst into a story about the narrator's romantic escapades. It's not that all Jewish guys undergoing analysis in a novel have to be comic characters or nebishes; but narrator of The Treatment, Jack Singer, becomes almost a Jewish action hero: he's an intellectual but also tough and athletic, even heroic; he plays ball with the school basketball team, confronts one of the toughest players and gets stabbed in the gut, winning over the sympathy of the unbearable head of school, he picks up or actually gets picked up by a beautiful and sexy young woman in the Met, he later gets hit on by the beautiful and wealthy widowed mom of one of the students - and so on - this guy is a super-stud, so why is he in analysis? OK, I'm not that naive, I get it that he has deeper-seated issues that make him unhappy despite all of his advantages - but the novel seems to have it both ways (I'm only about 90 pages in, so things may change) - the character in analysis does not seem to be the same guy as the character out of analysis, as if Menaker had a great idea for a long sketch about a man and his shrink but was on much shakier ground in trying to build that sketch out into the structure of a novel. What happens outside the office doesn't seem real - however - what will make or break the novel will be how much what happens in the office will affect what happens outside the office: already, we had one episode in which the (bad) advice, or more accurately observation, of Dr. Morales led Singer to break of a relation (with the woman from the Met); we will have to see whether Morales helps S. to live or ruins his life - or whether S. can evolve and gain independence and move out of the shadow of Morales's influence.