Space Technology

By: loretta martinelli
The despair of a life lived in solitude and marked by professional mediocrity; the personal defeat and the search for relief in psychoanalysis constitute the key traits of this lively novel. The author takes the reader through an accurate interpretation and dissection of a man’s inner emotions, on a journey across the character’s psyche, as well as some of his bold and extraordinary adventures.

Jake singer, an anxious and neurotic young English teacher at a prestigious New York prep school, had a motherless childhood, having she died prematurely of a stroke. So he was raised by a father with whom he was not on good terms.  These incidents are now resurfacing and are deeply affecting his adult life, as well as his relationship with his girlfriend, from whom he is eventually abandoned. Nor is his professional life more gratifying as he is refused the chance to become Head of the English Department.

It is then that Jake Singer embarks on a psychoanalytic journey with Dr Morales, a Cuban-Catholic Freudian psychoanalyst, a short, bald, black-bearded man with a strong Spanish accent. The book alternates between flashbacks and memories from the protagonist’s past with accounts of his present life on the couch of Dr Morales’s office, where “conversations echo other conversations, gestures in the present parody gestures from the past (…..) Life turns into something like fiction (…..) trying to interpret the earliest chapters of childhood (….)

In his Molière-style handling of the verbal material the author confers Dr Morales’s language vividness and authenticity, while in his portrayal of Jake Singer’s effort to find a way out of emotional paralysis, he recreates a sort of Joycean character.

None-the-less, Menaker succeeds in weaving the intimate intricacies of the mental work of his character, allowing the reader to capture its innermost experiences and feelings in an accessible way. The conclusion is triumphant and offers hope that “…all the circles broken by death or chance will some day be unbroken.”