'Across town, in an opulent apartment high above the city, a stunning young woman is found dangling from a chandelier – whipped, mutilated and strangled.’
Sadly, this blurb from its promotional website is about as interesting as ‘The Interpretation of Murder’ gets.
Sigmund Freud and two of his followers, including Carl Jung, visit New York in 1909. The cityscape is described in vast sweeping vistas, with the result that this crime novel, whose gimmick is to cast Freud as a detective, reads more like a hopeful Hollywood script. Few of the characters overcome the stiffness of reanimation – you’re reminded of Nixon and Kennedy shaking hands with Forrest Gump. Rubenfeld has researched all the details from the cuts of the suits to the panels on the taxicabs, and the action tumbles through ballrooms, brothels, building sites and underwater caverns.
If you’re into necrophilia, the corpses look great, with milk-pale thighs, whip marks and long, flowing hair. Using a young woman’s beautiful corpse as a catalyst for the incontinent and ageing analyst’s discourses, Rubenfeld fashions much of the dialogue from Freud and Jung’s published letters. But any truth behind statements such as ‘the pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct is incomparably more intense than satisfying a civilised one’ isn’t shown so much as merely stated, leaving the reader cold.
Ironically, the most lifelike dialogue occurs between the only two fictional characters.
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