Freudian slips: The Treatment

By chance I've recently finished Svevo's Confessions of Zeno and posted on Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (after watching Philip Roth: Unmasked), two of the landmarks in literature about psychoanalysis and now am reading Daniel Menaker's The Treatment current bookgroup selection at, no surprise, the suggestion of LR practitioner in the field - I had read The Treatment about 15 years ago when it was new but am trying to come at it fresh in this revisit. First off worth noting the major difference between The Treatment and the other books mentioned: in Treatment the analyst is practically the star player, whereas he (or she) is completely opaque in Portnoy and Zeno - just the vessel that holds their confessions. Now those are extreme cases and there are other novels in which the analyst plays a significant role as character - Prince of Tides, as one example - but rarely is the analyst the main character. Here, at least in first 50 pp or so, the analyst, a Cuban emigre in NYC named Morales (the translingual pun obviously intended - as Morales says at one point, There are no jokes) is the lead: we know far more about him through the narrator's reaction to him than we do about the narrator, though, my memory is, that this balance will shift and tilt over the course of the novel. Morales through narrator's eyes is strange and abrupt and quirky and even threatening - though a very good analyst, I would think: he's very quick with opinions and barbed comments. Narrator mentions he declined to have sex with a woman co-worker (he teaches in a NYC prep school) because she smelled "a bit odd," to which Morales: A bit odd? A bit odd? And why did you not tell me you were English? There's a little bit of a danger of this drifting off into a comic schtick - a few little slaps at Morales's accent, e.g., running n a wheel like a "chamster," but Menaker does a great job of creating one memorable character. Can this be sufficient, however, to carry the novel? If over the course of the novel we watch this relationship grow and evolve and we learn more about the narrator and the issues that bring him into treatment and we watch their resolution, or dissolution, this could become a really fine novel - but it can't sustain 30o pages as a comic schtick, at least I don't think it can, we'll see.