Inspector Freud in New York

The Interpretation of Murder
Jed Rubenfeld
This is a book to be enjoyed like a luxurious meal. The entrée is irresistibly thrilling, but there also are numerous side dishes with sauces, crudités and dips to digress into and mull over. A true feast for the mind.
Jed Rubenfeld's New York in 1909 is a city in ferment. Skyscrapers rise up every day, each being inaugurated in turn as the city's tallest building.Horse carriages jostle in the streets with gasoline-powered automobiles. The graceful, miraculously engineered bridges that link the island of Manhattan to the mainland known as the City of Brooklyn, are under serial construction. And entrance into high society is ruled by two ladies, arch rivals in their social ambitions, the rich and aristocratic (in as much as Americans can be aristocrats) Mrs Astor and the infinitely richer, but commoner, Mrs Vanderbilt.
The suffragist movement is in its infancy, with suffragettes being subjects of ridicule in gentlemen's clubs, contemptuously dismissed as unnatural women who need to be firmly bedded in order to be rid of their nonsensical notions. Women are considered very much as playthings for men, and 'female hysteria' is a subject much bandied about, with doctors of varying degrees of quackery providing 'cures' by means of climax-inducing machines which are often substituted by the flesh-and-blood apparatus of the doctor himself.
It is a smorgasbord of greed—financial, political and sexual—and into this charged atmosphere enters the eminent Doctor Sigmund Freud, with his two European colleagues, the excitable and affable Hungarian, Sandor Ferenczi, and the arrogant, lascivious and duplicitous Carl Jung, explicitly presented by Freud as his successor in the field of psychotherapy, but plotting to discredit his mentor. Coinciding with the arrival of the three eminent psychoanalysts to American shores is a series of attacks on beautiful young society debutantes, with two apparently dead and a third, the stunning Nora Acton, traumatised into amnesia and aphonia, the inability to speak.
On the case is Detective Jimmy Littlemore, irreverent, irrepressible and dogged. And, in parallel, treating the lovely Nora is Dr Stratham Younger, Freud's young American disciple, committed to proving the efficacy of his idol's theories of psychoanalysis, notably the sexual etiology on which Freud's theories are founded, with Oedipal yearnings at their core.
But for Littlemore as well as Younger, their respective cases are far from being a cakewalk. Graft and protectionism in political circles as well as in the police force time and again stymie Littlemore. Younger falls hopelessly in love with Nora and is lacerated by doubts regarding his own professionalism. And there is a rich and manipulative cabal of neurologists who find their influence threatened by psychotherapy, which seeks to erase the very term 'nervous diseases', and replace it with psychological understanding of repressed desires and childhood trauma. These powerful men will stop at nothing to prevent Freud's works being translated and particularly to scuttle the University lecture series for which Freud has been specially invited to America.
Into this cauldron of intrigue, Rubenfeld has stirred large doses of anti-Semitism against Freud, the Viennese Jew; fascinating discussions within the Freudian group of psychotherapy, its theories and applications; the beginnings of the forensic sciences; an exposition of the overpowering tenacity of both sexual desire as well as sexual revulsion; a masterly treatise on bridge building and the effects of decompression on the human body; and an exploration into the savage conditions in the sweat shops where women, such as Littlemore's girlfriend, work for pathetic wages for over 12 hours without a break—not even to use the toilet. And, as a bonus, running through the book like a silken thread is the remarkable Freudian analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet, with particular reference to Hamlet's Oedipal desires (did he really have them?), his inability to take action (was it a fact?) and a revelatory new interpretation of his famous soliloquy, 'To be or not to be'.
Jed Rubenfeld's brilliant novel is an interpretation of much more than murder. It's an interpretation of the human mind.