The Reflection

July 13, 2015
Set in New York City in 1949, this well-written but unsatisfying novel from Wilcken (The Execution) tells the story of psychiatrist David Manne, who commits an apparently violent man, Peter Esterhazy, to the Stevens Institute, a Manhattan mental hospital. When the patient later persuades Manne that his real name is Smith and he’s being held against his will, Manne smuggles Esterhazy/Smith out of the institute and takes the man back to Manne’s own apartment. A day later, while Esterhazy/Smith is alone in the apartment, Manne is pushed (or does he jump?) onto the subway tracks and suffers serious head injuries. When Manne is pegged as “Stephen Smith” (he has Esterhazy/Smith’s ID in his pocket), he must convince his doctor of his true identity. A fine stylist, Wilcken captures a noirish, postwar New York, but the surreal story—more mysterious than a mystery—never compels enough interest to make the reader accept the bizarre premise or care about its consequences.

July 1, 2015
A psychiatrist takes a case that threatens his very identity in this tricky thriller. David Manne is a shrink in postwar Manhattan who consults on various police cases. Called to a downtown tenement to evaluate a distraught man, he finds a harried but lucid fellow who insists he's not the person the woman claiming to be his wife, as well as the police, says he is. Manne, bored with his predictable practice and predictable single life, decides to follow up and stumbles into a situation where, as they say, things are not what they seem. Up to this point, Wilcken (The Execution, 2002) has built a unique portrait of '40s New York. Instead of the rush of urban life that's the usual image of the city, he emphasizes the solitary. The people on the streets and the newspaper hawkers Wilcken describes fall away next to the feeling of being alone in a crowd. Wilcken recasts automats and movie theaters and diners as peculiarly noirish palaces of isolation. Which is what makes it all the more disappointing when Manne winds up in the same condition as his patient, at the mercy of people insisting he's someone else. Wilcken is trying for the mix of absurdity and hallucinatory threat John Franklin Bardin achieved in his 1946 classic The Deadly Percheron, but the novel's intrigue peters away into sub-Kafkaesque trickery. Wilcken's novel starts out both welcoming and sinister. Sadly, the identity crisis it most compellingly describes is its own.

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August 1, 2015

Psychiatrist David Manne's life feels like no life at all: day after day, he cycles back and forth between his bare apartment and his posh office, ending the day listening to the same scratchy records, always Beethoven. Then things begin to happen. He suspects he's being followed. There's a policeman in his office but nobody let him in. The policeman wants Manne to write a commitment order for another officer who's threatened his wife with violence. But the other cop insists he's not who they say he is and claims the woman isn't his wife at all. Manne writes the order anyway: the accused is sent off to an institution with a cloudy history. Manne investigates. Anomalies keep surfacing. Then Manne himself is injured, almost killed, while carrying the other man's wallet in his pocket. He's committed to the same place because he won't admit he's the other man, not himself. To get out he has to pretend he's not himself. VERDICT This exceptional psychological thriller will remind readers of the works of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell at their creepiest. Wilcken (The Execution) has written a jittery novel of alternative truths, none at all comforting. For discerning suspense lovers.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2015
David Manne, hero and narrator of this glum thriller, is a psychiatrist in 1940s New York. Outwardly a success, he knows what a flop he really is. His wife cuckolded him, the clinical journals reject his articles, he has no faith in his profession, where patients rarely got better and often got worse. But now people he barely knows ask his help at a crime scene. The moment he turns up he spots something wrong. These aren't victims; they're actors who have been posed. An identity mix-up has him trading places with the accused, and he must live out the other man's life to get at what's happened. The layers of mystification that follow are, well, mystifying, and readers may lack the patience to plod through the slow unraveling. The author has been compared to Camus, but it's movies that come to mind. Hitchcock did the actress bit in Vertigo, and the reflection of the title was explored in the Roger Moore vehicle The Man Who Haunted Himself. Recommended for readers who love a psychological puzzle within the crime plot.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)