You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, producer and host.

I'm here today with Daniel Menaker,

the author of his first novel, The Treatment,

published by Knapp.

And I wanted to begin by acknowledging that the book is about

a way of life that Mr. Meneker is very familiar with. He is an editor at Random House, has served as an

editor at The New Yorker. Members of his family are on the New York Times Book review. He is a literary man living in New York,

and the book is about a literary man who has taken on the nightmare of teaching.

He is also in psychoanalysis with a strange Cuban, Latin American analyst who is dictatorial and sometimes mean and very funny, named Morales. And to some extent, the book functions as a portrait of a certain kind of life in New York.

To what extent do you feel that life becomes representative or at all universal?

Well, I think that this young man, Jake Singer, the patient of Dr. Ernesto Morales, I think in some ways

it's a very typical young man trying to grow up and come of age.

And insofar as he's a literary man as a teacher, the nightmare of being a teacher, as you say, and it is sometimes

nightmarish, sometimes joyous.

I think what it does is give him a chance to speak in literary terms.

My hope was that because he was a teacher and very involved in the text and material that he's teaching,

that he would be able to make certain kinds of references and give the entire book,

...