interesting-and clever if a bit too "freudian" for my tastes. The author says he let his daughters read a pg version. It's hard to imagine what that would consist of.
( )

If I had only read the first half of the book, I'd have awarded it 4.5 stars. The research that Rubenfeld did to craft this book was immense and really brought early 20th-century New York to life in a fascinating way. The seamless blend of fiction and historical fact, combined with a gripping plot made the book unputdownable. However, the ending was quite ridiculous and I was bitterly disappointed. ( )

[This is a review I wrote in 2007]

Not your run-of-the-mill thriller, Jed Rubenfeld has expertly crafted this book around Sigmund Freud's psychological theories, his work, "The Interpretation of Dreams", and his most famously known case-study, "Dora", here in the novel loosely portrayed as the character Nora. There is much debate amongst the characters about Freud's Oedipus complex theory, and a further interwoven strand of analysis involves theories about Shakespeare's "Hamlet", and in particular Freud's Oedipal analysis of Hamlet and Ophelia.

It's an extremely clever blend of fact and fiction, based around Freud & Jung's visit to the US in 1909; the crime, of course, is pure fiction! The plot is fast-paced, with twists, it seems, every few pages. This one really did keep me guessing almost to the very end. Very occasionally the theorising weighs it down just a fraction, hence the 4 stars. An intelligent & intriguing thriller, with likeable characters - I can highly recommend it. ( )

An interesting psychological thriller/historical fiction but slow in spots. I didn't love it. ( )

The denouement was convoluted and slightly unconvincing. And when the author credited his young daughters for helping with the structure of the novel, noting that they read a PG version, I wondered how much narrative was left once the bondage, fellatio, erotic asphyxiation, and flagellation was removed from the plot. Not my taste in literature, personally. I also wondered how plausible, in medical terms, was the hero's death-defying escape from the flooding caisson at the bottom of the river. Can one really escape "the bends" simply by exhaling during a far-too-rapid rise to the surface? The author's impressive educational credentials include legal, psychological, and dramatic background, not medical. But the squabbling amongst the psychoanalysts (often in their own words gleaned from published material) was amusing and New York of 1909 in all its gritty glory was a fascinating panorama. (However, sometimes I suspected Rubenfeld of dragging in irrelevant characters and events simply for purposes of atmosphere, because he felt this or that thing was too interesting to omit. Some also made serviceable red herrings.) I particularly liked the protagonist's take on both the Oedipal theory and Hamlet. I'm tempted to rip out some relevant pages and file them inside one of my reference works on Hamlet... ( )