The Duelist

Dog is dead, goes the more or less serious message of Daniel Menaker’s more or less bubbly and very brightly written novel. Dog being whichever one you choose of our era’s two reversed deities. Figuring that God, proper, had lost his vital signs, the 20th century tried out Marx and Freud.

Menaker devotes only a word or two to Marx, what with the job already done on him by the toppled Berlin Wall and other crackups. It is Freud whose passing he notes in “The Treatment” with a mix of comic irony and regret. His foolish and brilliant, idealistic and abominable Dr. Morales, a Cuban psychoanalyst, has a respectable Fifth Avenue office at the start of the book. By the end he has declined to shabby quarters in Chelsea.

The black-bearded and malapropistic Morales is the gravitational force around which Jake Singer, the protagonist and narrator, pursues a wobbly orbit. When he finally floats free, it is less through his own energies than through the ebbing of the force that held and propelled him.

Jake makes a winning narrator and an agreeable, if vaguely unresolved, character, even though by the end he has matured and achieved quite a bit. At the start he is a talented but frustrated English teacher at a posh New York private school, has broken up with his girlfriend and endures the disapproving silence of a cardiologist father who has all but disowned him for eschewing the profitable professions. His life has been a series of failed encounters and near misses, largely owing to the cautious angle he maintains to it.

There is nothing cautious about the authoritarian and volatile Morales as he goes about unblocking Jake’s latent ferocity and elan. (As an adolescent living with his chilly widower father, Jake had made a point of getting in trouble with the law. At the school where he teaches, he steps between the foul-mouthed basketball coach and a knife-wielding black scholarship student and is seriously cut.)

Morales goads, insults and contradicts. When Jake responds to a suggestion, the analyst contradicts himself by deriding what he has suggested. Jake seeks to turn the tables by trying to analyze the analyzer, only to be harshly put down. When he rebels, Morales accuses him of using anger to evade his problems. Jake threatens to quit. What he wants is someone kinder and more sympathetic.

“I’m afraid this is not my function,” Morales retorts. “What I shall try to do, if you will permit me, is to help you learn how to obtain from others what it is that you want.” It is a neat enough statement of psychoanalysis’ chilly method and ambition.

Jake’s story is continually intercut by Morales’ scathing commentary. His affair with a generously sexy young artist withers after the analyst suggests that her request for a brief loan means that she is a prostitute. When Jake, whose knife-point intervention has made him a school hero and advanced his career, falls in love with Allegra, a wealthy young widow, Morales encourages him to bed her. When he does and goes on to marry her, the analyst plays up her anxiety attacks and labels her “mad.”

Jake’s voice and Morales’--after a while Jake hears the latter assailing and correcting him even when he is not there--are a duet for flute and bassoon. The flute part is light but gracefully written. Jake evokes New York’s asperities--a woman trying to cheat her way onto a bus, the lethal pushiness of private school parents--along with the beauty of the seasons. A maple tree turned prematurely red stands “as if reconnoitering for autumn.”

His affair and later his marriage to Allegra are a touching and evocative portrait of the breathless birth, lusty prime and patient aging of sexual passion. On the other hand, a dramatic interlude in which Jake confronts the birth-mother of Allegra’s adopted daughter is a collage drawn on inferior paper and glued in. There are melodramatic scenes with the woman’s second husband, an insanely controlling lawyer. It seems to be padding for the sake of a diversion from Jake’s quieter recollections and his duel with Morales.

The duel itself is the heart of the book, though it would be intolerable--bassoon solo and no flute--without the relief of Jake’s story. On the face of it, Morales resembles other serio-comic fictional psychoanalysts. Menaker is in debt to Philip Roth, both for the comedy and for the intensity of argument. He gives his Cuban an occasionally Germanic word order and at least one recurring phrase--”isn’t it?”--that is more French than Spanish.

Chiding Jake for his disinclination to make overtures to a father who will not live much longer, Morales mixes a wonderfully four-barreled metaphor: “Someday, if you will mend the fence with him and stop sitting astride it as if it were the horse’s ass you were making of yourself you may inherit his estate.”

We never quite figure Morales out, but this, though occasionally frustrating, contributes to the vigor and complexity of Menaker’s portrait. His persistent hectoring not only grows tiresome but suggests at times a quasi-sadistic obsession. As Jake grows more independent and decisive and takes control of his life--due in part, no doubt, to Morales’ treatment--the analyst struggles perversely to hold on to him.

Menaker is exploring a complexity: the simultaneous power of the analyst and his or her human weaknesses. Evincing boredom and contempt for much of what Jake tells him, for example, Morales perks up when there is a mention of money or sex. He wants every detail of Jake’s investments, deriding his cautious refuge in CDs. He is avid for descriptions of intercourse noises and positions. “I left the session,” Jake says, “feeling like a porn potboiler that had been thumbed through by some creep in search of the good parts.”

Good and evil, a passion to cure and a passion to control. Menaker’s psychoanalyst is, finally, an artist in both his integrity and his unscrupulousness. And when, by the end, we may have wearied of his shuttlecock refrain, a new note appears. It is a double note that suggests two kinds of futility.

One is Jake’s. He is cured, important--he is the school’s skillful and respected headmaster--married in reasonable happiness and, through his wife, very rich, and the savor has departed from his voice. He recounts his blessings at length; they could be his investment portfolio. We think of the biblical demons exorcised and followed by even worse demons. What follows Jake’s cure is spiritual emptiness.

As for Morales, he speaks one last time. Harsh cynicism is replaced by bitter lament. The long line of care for the individual human spirit, from the Greeks through Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and leading up to the long, intense ordeal of Freudian analysis, has come to an end. Quick therapies, 12-step arrangements and psychopharmacology are replacing it, he announces. The human adventure, shrunk in aspiration, has gone flat. He tends to a remaining few “serious” patients, and a number of the hopelessly destroyed, in broken-down premises on a side street.