It's a pity that Freud failed to see the literary worth of his most compelling case histories. Even more unfortunate is his denunciation of any who read them for their narrative appeal alone: "I am aware," he wrote in the prefatory remarks to one of his most famous studies, "that there are many physicians who (revolting though it may seem) choose to read a case history of this kind not as a contribution to the psychopathology of neuroses, but as a roman à clef designed for their private delectation."

Undoubtedly, Freud would have found Jed Rubenfeld's The Interpretation of Murder altogether revolting. But for those of us with sufficiently "perverse" literary tastes, the premise of this psychological murder-mystery seems quite, well, delectable: the year is 1909, and Freud himself, along with his protégé Carl Jung, has just arrived in New York City to deliver a series of lectures at Clark University. Dr. Stratham Younger, a long-time advocate of Freud's theories and a budding physician in his own right, has been assigned to accompany the psychologist-cum-celebrity during his stay in America. The psychiatrists' amusements (the usual feats of dream-analysis and jokes of "Oedipal duty"), however, are cut short when the mutilated body of Elizabeth Riverford is found in a penthouse suite of the Balmoral Hotel.

The city's mayor quietly dispatches his trusted coroner and the bumbling-but-trustworthy Detective Littlemore to the hotel. Their work is hindered by the hotel's wealthy owner, George Banwell, who fears the consequences of a highly publicized murder. Banwell stalls, and the murderer strikes again. When his second victim--the beautiful Nora Acton--escapes alive, but with no voice and no memory of her attack, Dr. Younger is summoned to uncover the identity of her attacker by examining the roots of her hysteria. With Younger engaged in his own psychoanalytic pursuits, Freud is left to face ideological challenges from his upstart disciple Jung. Meanwhile, a mysterious force of Christian zealotry threatens to undermine not only Freud's lectures at Clark, but the very basis of his psychoanalytic theories. Littlemore sleuths, Young psychoanalyzes, and it will not spoil the story to write that both find Freud's crisis mysteriously related to the incident at the Balmoral. A contribution to the "psychopathology of neuroses" this is not; whether it succeeds as a convoluted roman à clef is another matter.

The novel--Rubenfeld's first--is nothing if not ambitious. Whether it is a murder mystery couched in a framework of historical fiction or a historical work framed by a fictitious murder mystery is difficult to tell. The crime story is interwoven with references to, and explications of, everything from Hamlet to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge to the foundational theories of Freudian psychoanalysis. Rubenfeld navigates these multiple threads of his novel with admirable--if at times overly academic--dexterity. His alternation between Younger's first-person account and a third-person narration of Littlemore's adventures creates a fast-paced and enthralling plot structure in spite of its heavy reliance on well-worn mystery tropes (chloroform, a missing corpse, corrupt police, even a wily "Chinaman"--and that's just the c 's). Indeed, Rubenfeld's firm grasp of such tropes suggests his greatest gift as a writer: the ability to provide a firm historical foundation to an otherwise fictional work.

Given his academic background (undergraduate at Princeton, Harvard Law School, and a current professorship at Yale Law), Rubenfeld's knack for historical research should come as no surprise. His two previous books ( Revolution by Judiciary: The Structure of American Constitutional Law and Freedom in Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government ) were somewhat different than his current work, but even in the murder-mystery genre Rubenfeld cannot help but show his academic tendencies. In an Author's Note, he claims (with no little pride) that nearly all of his descriptions, "down to the color of the paneling on the taxis," are based in meticulously researched fact. (There's even a website for fastidious readers to report factual errors.) His pride is quite justified: the architectural and geographic landscape of the City is presented in extensive detail, and the social etiquette of New York high society is as richly described as the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

But as Younger's treatment of Nora--and with it, the arc of the mystery plot--takes shape, the drawbacks of Rubenfeld's focus on "research" become increasingly apparent. Essentially, Rubenfeld has transplanted Freud's analysis of the hysterical symptoms of a certain "Dora" (the therapist always wrote in pseudonyms) to the world of 20 th century New York. In his seminal study of hysteria, Freud sought to link Dora's symptoms with her unconscious libidinal drives. Dora terminated her treatment prematurely, but Freud emerged with a compelling, albeit fragmentary, case history, as well as the new theory of "transference" in patient-therapist relations. Change a letter in Freud's classic analysis and you have Nora, the second victim of Rubenfeld's perverted attacker. She suffers from the same general hysteria--manifested in her supposed amnesia and aphonia--as Dora, and Younger seeks to relieve these symptoms in the same manner as Freud. However, what initially promises to be a compelling adaptation of Freud's analysis--particularly the problems of transference--to the urgency of a murder plot is ultimately inconsequential. Younger's treatment of Nora complicates the novel until the very last turn, and its ultimate relevance is tenuously affirmed only in a wildly implausible conclusion.

It is as if Freud and his theories of psychoanalysis are present, not for the sake of the story itself, but rather as a playground for Rubenfeld's own intellectual fancies. The author devotes a sizable portion of his narration to the strained relationship between Freud and Jung. As usual, Rubenfeld has certainly done his homework, but their conflict only adds to the story's confused mesh of subplots, and contributes nothing to its arc. As if the complete irrelevance of Jung were not enough, Rubenfeld, in a moment of astonishing self-congratulation, revises Freud's famous interpretation of the To be or not to be soliloquy in Hamlet. Never mind that a novel already drowning in subplots has no need for another, and never mind that Rubenfeld's "definite interpretation," once articulated, leaves Younger as disappointed as this reviewer: "The pity of it was that this discovery, if such it was, now seemed so stale, so profitless to me. What good was it?" I ask the same.

For all its supposed reliance on psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Murder assumes no prior knowledge of Freud's work. And while Rubenfeld clearly explicates where necessary, his presentations of the essentials of Freudian theory seem forced and didactic. Much of Freud's "dialogue" is, in fact, lifted directly from his own scientific and speculative works. This may make The Interpretation of Murder a useful "Brief Introduction to Freud," but it sacrifices Freud's character for his theories. He becomes an excuse for witty pleasantries ("Can you psychoanalyze anyone, Dr. Freud?" Banwell's wife asks at the beginning of her dinner party) and the justification for subtle humor ("Boy," Detective Littlemore exclaims at one point, "I used to think if I could only find a girl like Mom, I'd marry her in a heartbeat.") and borderline vulgarity ("Or what he says about feces--feces for God's sake," a critic of Freud explodes, "or about fastidious men wanting sex through the anus?"). In the end, not only does Rubenfeld fail to enhance his own murder mystery with Freud's theories of psychoanalysis, but he also neglects to provide an interesting characterization of Freud himself. While the Freudian gimmick might make for an occasionally amusing read, the novel's implausible conclusion does little but leave the reader feeling tricked by its elaborate premise.

The failings of The Interpretation of Murder are made all the more acute by Rubenfeld's promise as a mystery writer. The final blow to his novel lies not in its own shortcomings and needless complications, however, but in the company it tries to keep. For all his focus on the pure science of his work, Freud himself was an unintentional master of the psychological mystery. Whatever Rubenfeld adds to "Dora" and other case histories in chloroform and corpses, he loses in his reliance on Freud's own analysis. In the end, Rubenfeld tells a clever murder mystery. But Freud told it better.

 

Samuel Bjork '09 is a Social Studies concentrator in Eliot House. For now.