The Treatment - Rilegato

Menaker, Daniel

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0679422064 ISBN 13: 9780679422068

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1998

Riassunto

Jake Singer is an anxious young schoolteacher in New York--barely on speaking terms with his father, recently abandoned by his girlfriend, and heading for a life of compromise and mediocrity at a prestigious New York prep school. Emotionally paralyzed by a case of the vapors, he embarks on a course of psychoanalysis with a maniacal Cuban-Catholic Freudian--Dr. Ernesto Morales, therapist from hell, a man who wields his sarcasm like a machete in the slash-and-burn process he calls interpretation. Morales's accent and tactics are worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, and Jake is just trying to keep him at a distance while he plans his escape. But when he meets socialite widow Allegra Marshall, and finds himself upwardly mobile in the Manhattan of serious money and glamour--as he bounces from the couch to Allegra's bed in the allegedly real world and back again--his whole life begins to take on the eerie, overdetermined quality of an analytic session.

While he struggles to resolve the psychic grudge he bears his parents, Jake becomes embroiled in another parental conflict--of a different kind and with even higher stakes--that may threaten the future of one of Allegra's adopted children. And if from his horizontal vantage point on Morales's couch Jake's world has started to feel suffocatingly predictable, life beyond the couch makes it clear that the world's true organizing principles are chance and accident: that the only indisputable axiom is happenstance.

With wit, grace, and style, Daniel Menaker has written a hilarious novel about coming to terms with life's unruliness, about trying to extract meaning from chaos. Jake gets the Treatment--not just from Morales but from the world--and his notion of unending improvement collides with the possibility of taking pleasure when and where he can, and learning to accept love in place of perfection.    

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Daniel Menaker worked at The New Yorker for twenty-six years, twenty of them as Senior Editor. He has won two O. Henry Awards and is the author of two short story collections, The Old Left and Friends and Relations. Now Senior Literary Editor at Random House, he lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

I WAS GOING TO BE LATE. A fat woman in a quilted brown parka--she looked like a walking onion--had kept
everyone waiting in the heavy snow at Ninety-sixth and Broadway while she argued with the driver. She was trying
to get him to take a transfer from the day before. She insisted, loudly, that a downtown driver had just issued the
transfer to her. "It couldn't be, lady," the driver said. His Caribbean accent, his delicate features, the touch of gray at
his temples made him seem like an aristocrat with favors to dispense, especially in the presence of the bulging
woman and the huddled masses outside.

"I'm telling you not five minutes ago," the woman said.

"And I'm telling you that he couldn't have any transfers from yesterday," the driver said. "They are destroyed
each day."

Holding aloft the slip of blue paper, the woman turned around and shouted at the rest of us, bunched up against
the snow and wind blasting off the Hudson, "Five minutes ago! Five minutes!"

During the silent glaring that followed, another crosstown bus stopped across the street, and among the
passengers who got off were four or five Coventry School seniors, dressed only in sports jackets and slacks and
sneakers. In two hours some of them would jostle their way into my second-period eleventh-grade English class,
and I would give them farcical interpretations of the first half of Billy Budd until one of the quicker ones began to
suspect I was putting them on.

"Hey, Mr. Singer," one boy called.

"Hey, Jake, where ya headed?" another shouted, probably taking the weather as permission for impertinence.

If I'd wanted to answer the question, I would have said, "Boys, I'm going to see my psychoanalyst, Dr. Ernesto
Morales." And if I'd wanted to amplify, I'd have added, "He's a Cuban, and a devout Catholic, apparently. There's a
crucifix in the waiting room and another one on the wall behind his chair. I got his name from the school
psychologist." And if I were histrionic, like the fat woman, I would have gone on yelling my plaint for all to hear:
"You see, boys, I am in real trouble. My mother died when I was six, on the day before Halloween--Mischief
Night, if you're susceptible to ironies, as I know a few of you are when you manage to stay awake in class--my
father and I are barely on speaking terms, and my girlfriend left me two months ago. And I'm not going to be head
of the English Department next year after all. I told the headmaster that I thought the football coach was too hard on
the players, and he didn't want to hear it, so he used it as an excuse not to give me the job."

But no. It would never do even to allude to my problems to the boys. First of all, I wasn't so crazy that I didn't
know how boring my plight would be to most people. Even the banality of evil is outstripped by the banality of
anxiety neurosis. Second, the kids weren't my friends, and third, even though they weren't my friends, they were all
I had left. Anyway, I was sure at the time that I wouldn't be seeing Dr. Morales much longer. He was a madman
privateer for whom conservative Freudianism was merely a flag of convenience, and I was just trying to keep him
at a distance as I planned my escape--into what, I had no idea. The school psychologist must have been crazy
herself.

"How long are we going to allow ourselves to be treated like this?" the fat woman demanded of the wind.

"Come on," I said. "Here. I was third in line, and I reached around the person in front of me and handed the fat
woman a token.

The woman snatched it from my hand. "It's not the money," she said angrily. "It's the way we are treated. But
obviously you don't care about that. So all right, all right." She put the token and the transfer into her purse and took
out another transfer. She turned around, the fabric of her casing sighing against the metal panels of the bus's
entryway, and handed the second transfer to the driver.

"Can you beat it?" the driver said to me as I paid my fare.

TEN MINUTES AFTER my session should have started, I pushed the buzzer outside the door of the brownstone
in which Dr. Morales's office occupied the rear of the top floor, and he buzzed me in. In the stuffy, overheated
waiting room, the white-noise machine was hissing away. The machine could sound like anything--wind in a cane
field outside Havana, a wave receding on a beach, a tiger's warning--but today it was just static. I looked out the
window, which was flanked by two big flowerpots out of which Cacti freudii derelicti thornily protruded. In the
backyard of the house across the way, snow was building up on the back of the huge sow.

"Yes, I know the story of this pig," Dr. Morales had said a few weeks earlier. "This was Johnny Carson's house,
and he had the statue installed in the yard. And when he moved he did not take the pig."

"It's strange," I said.

"I agree," Dr. Morales said, "but what is even stranger to me is that you have not mentioned it before now. You
have been coming three times a week for how long-two months now?"

"Four," I said. "But who's counting?"

"We shall get back to your anger in a moment," he said. "But right now perhaps you could talk a little about why
you did not bring up such an odd thing for such a long time."

This was as far as I got in my recollection of the pig conversation, which had quickly and typically put us at
sword's point, when Dr. Morales opened the door to his inner office. He was beaming, as usual, and was bent at the
waist at the customary ten-degree angle, in what I took to be sarcastic deference. This upper-body inclination made
him seem even shorter than he was. He had on a white shirt and the vest and trousers of a three-piece suit, and his
shoulders ballooned out like a miniature stevedore's. Light bounced off his shiny bald head, and behind his straight,
heavy, broomlike black beard and narrow mustache, he was smiling the diabolical smile he always smiled.

"Good morning, Mr. Singer," he said in his insinuating way--his voice, as always, even more flamboyantly
Spanished in reality than it was in my memory. "Please come in."

"There was this fat woman on the bus," I started out after I lay down on the couch. I told him the rest. "She was
probably on the way to her analyst," I said at the end. "Life in the city. How can someone let herself get so fat?"

"What do you think?" Dr. Morales said.

"Well, I suppose with some people it's just their metabolism or glands or something."

"So you are apologizing for her and for yourself."

"Myself?"

"With this `Well, I suppose.' This is a habit, as I have pointed out before. You guess, you suppose, you think
maybe. You castrate yourself before it happens, what you so fear--that if you display your balls, someone else will
cut them off. Preemptive self-castration."

"Opinions are testicles?"

"Yes. And so are feelings. You are amused, but this is the case. And people do not let themselves get fat, by the
way. Again we have this passivity. They make themselves fat."

"Well, so why do they do it?"

"You must tell me what you think."

"It could be physical. They might--"

Dr. Morales dropped some papers on the floor. As he picked them up, he said, "Now we are like--what do you
call them?--a champster on a wheel."

"Hamster. But sometimes it must be physiological."

"When it is, it is boring. As boring as this conversation. Unfortunate, maybe even tragic, but boring. The majority
are fat because they want to be fat. They feel entitled to have more room and more attention than other people. They
talk too loudly and they take up two seats on the bus. They cheave themselves around, and everyone else has to
make room for them. And excuses, as you are doing. If you go to the mountain for a hike with them, they get out of
breath going up the hill and you have to wait for them. They want attention, and they are saying they should not
have to take responsibility for what they do."

Dr. Morales paused. "You are smiling again, I can tell."

"It seems to me so outrageous as to be funny," I said.

"But were you not angry at this woman?"

"Of course. I told you."

"Then why do you laugh when I am denouncing her?"

The office was silent except for the ticking of the wind-driven snow against the windows.

"Maybe it's because it would never enter my mind to go on a mountain hike with a fat person."

"Again the `maybe.' You disavow your anger, and you do not have the courage of your own contempt. She is a
clown, I am a clown, the entire world is a circus, correct? But even then it is only maybe that the whole world is a
circus and everyone except you is a clown. I must tell you honestly that I do not know how to proceed right now."

"I did not disavow my anger," I said.

"Ah, but you did, you did," Dr. Morales said. "You presented it as if it were a play and you were a character but
in the audience at the same time. You had even a title for it, as I recall. The Life of the City."

"Life in the City," I said.

"Now, really, Mr. Singer, I must protest. You are correcting me and resisting the treatment at every drop of the
hat. You do not want intercourse but frottage."

"All right. I was angry at the fa...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679422064
• ISBN 13: 9780679422068
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 269