456
PARTISAN REVIEW
dialogues in order to better understand his characters. A literary
critic would comment that through this device the taciturn
Nathan is being manipulated by Neugeboren into revealing
more of himself .than he otherwise could in conventional dia–
logue or thought. And they would all be right.
And they would a ll be enjoying themselves. For all the
structural integrity of
The Stolen Jew,
no scene is forced to fit a
pattern. Although Nathan is the author of
The Stolen Jew
and
the main character in another
The Stolen Jew,
and although the
outer book is peppered with quotations and whole chapters of
the inner, Nathan never becomes a literary device before he is a
person. The old box-within-the-box trick is not being performed
because (as with, say, John Barth) the author thinks it a jim–
dandy idea, or because (as with John Irving) the author needs the
inner quotations to assert his protagonist 's literary skills, or be–
cause (as with Philip Roth ) the author wishes to bl ur artfully the
line between his own life and his protagonist's life. No, this fic–
tion-within-a-fiction serves Nathan Malkin's needs before Jay
Neugeboren's. As hard as Nathan is in life, he can express his
true tenderness only in his fiction.
Just as the true Nathan exists exclusively neither in his
emotional fiction nor in his cold personal comportment, but
rather in both of them at once, so does Neugeboren's book unify
contradictions. "My child is alive, my chi ld is dead, " Nathan 's
mother used to wa il about his brother's insanity, and Nathan
thinks the same thought about the book he wrote while young
and rewrote as an o ld man: " My book is a li ve, my book is dead."
Riddl ed with four-letter words like
love, home, soul, loss, hero,
whose obscene sentimentality has deadened many another book,
The Stolen Jew
manages nevertheless to come vibrantly alive.
STEVEN
GOLDLEAF
REINVENTING FREUD
FREUD: BIOLOGIST OF THE MIND: BEYOND THE PSYCHOANA–
LYTIC LEGENDS. By Frank
J.
Sulloway.
Basic Books, $23.50.
Although Frank Sulloway takes the biologistic Wilhelm
Fliess as the real hero of Freud 's early development, his avowedly
