These dreams are only in your head: Patient and analyst in The Treatment

Daniel Menaker's The Treatment has so much promise and contains so much material for a great comic contemporary novel that could stand beside Roth and maybe Bellow - and yet - the novel too often seems cut adrift, as if M. doesn't know quite what to do with his excellent premise, how to develop two characters with a specific type of relationship - analyst and patient/narrator - into a relationship that sustain, or that M. can sustain, across the course of a novel. He's doing something more daring than two of the most famous of analyst-novels, Portnoy and Zeno, in that in neither of those was the analyst more than a vessel or recipient. Menaker is interested in developing the relation and examining how the analytic relationship impinges on, affects, controls, even dominates the life of the patient/narrator outside the scope of the analytic sessions. One amusing device he uses to show this is that over the course of time the analyst, Morales, appears less in the narrative foreground - descriptions of the analytic sessions - and more in the interior life of the patient - speaking to the patient, Singer, in italics - which obviously sound or read exactly like Morales when actually speaking: S., like many patients, has internalized the voice. What can be interesting would be how M either helps S. to live his life - or perhaps hinders him from doing so. Menaker hasn't made his move yet on that front, half-way through the novel, and that's kind of the problem: outside of the analytic relationship the rest of what's going on in The Treatment is either far-fetched male fantasy (beautiful women bestowing themselves on the seemingly hapless narrator) or a pedestrian contemporary-issue story: birth mother tries to get back her child whom the wealthy widowed socialite (Singer's lover, Allegra) who is in the process of adopting her. Jodi Picault meets Philip Roth, in other words. The mix of genres just isn't working, and I wish at this point that Menaker had been more daring and aggressive with the narrative premise that began this novel so auspiciously.