I heard this serialised on bbc radio 4 about 10 years ago.It was a funny and moving account of a man's relationship with his father. I'd love to read it myself - pity it's out of print.

It is no surprise that Richard Ford (Independence Day, etc.) gives an endorsement of this paperback on the inside cover. Both authors have the same easy, wicked sense of humor, plot, character development and pacing.

But this is no spoof about life. It illuminates the absurdities of our own human foibles. The confrontations (appointments) and thoughts about Dr. Morales (the Cuban-Catholic-Freudian analyst from hell) are fall-down, outrageously funny.

With such a tremendous beginning, the book does slow down around the mid-point, but the author picks it back up to an acceptable finish. Given the author's experience as a magazine author and an editor, some of the plot is obvious and predictable. However the humaneness of the words saves the day. Great for a first novel and has great potential for a hilarious movie.

Menaker has an original concept, and a good handle on the higjly implausible, but no less hilarious character of Dr. Morales, the eccentric, Spanish therapist treating Jake Singer, the story's narrator. Jake is in his early thirties, a teacher at a local Manhattan prep school and suffering from defeatism and despair. The author never really delves into the cause of this dubious psychosis, other than having Morales connect it to the early death of Jake's mother and his estrangement from his father, and the overall book is diminished slightly for it. On the other hand, watching Morales obnoxiously push Jake to overcome his problems, while seemingly, paradoxically, encouraging them, is the meat of the novel, funny, touching and provocative. Is Dr. Morales really trying to cure Jake, or is he actually dependent on him, as Jake sometimes thinks, and reluctant to declare him finished with the treatment? As Jake begins to achieve success, both professionally and in his love life, Morales seems more determoned than ever to keep Jake in treatment. Jake wonders, as does the reader, if Morales might be living vicariously though him, especially when he insists on intimate details of every sexual act Jake and his new lover perform. The verbal fencing between therapist and patient is always witty and often revealing, and raises interesting questions about the nature of therapy and of the patient/therapist dynamic. Menaker graciously declines to give any concrete evidence concerning Dr. Morale's possibly conflicted motives, which allows the reader to either agree with Jake or not. This reader would have liked to see more of the sessions and their manifestations in Jake's life, and less of the distracting sublot suddenly introduced midway through the book concerning Jake's lover's adopted daughter and her original birth mother. The switch in stories, as well as narrators (from Jake to third person) was disconcerting and not becoming in what was otherwise an intimate and cleverly wrought novel.

You know how you get a feeling about a book --it's cover design, the description on the jacket, some aspect of the book that kind of gets you interested. Well, that's what happened with The Treatment. Maybe I'm a sucker for short titles or whatever but this book really delivered and offers a highy involving, entertaining and quite funny read while presenting, at least it did to me, a great many ideas and thoughts about what this whole thing we do, called living, is all about. Now I know I may be "overselling" this book but I highly recommend it as a wonderful urban, contemporary read.And I can't wait for the author to write his next novel.