[In the following excerpt, Schwartz regards Blake's Therapy as a “nightmarish social parable.”]

In a 1989 interview in Salmagundi, the Chilean writer and political activist Ariel Dorfman described one of his characters as caught in “the anguish of not being able to distinguish between his fears and his everyday life.” Anyone who knows Dorfman's prodigious body of work—novels, plays, social criticism, and the memoir, Heading South, Looking North (1998)—will infer a context of political repression, especially in Chile under General Augusto Pinochet. But in Dorfman's latest and harrowing novel, the anguish is equally severe in an American corporate culture turned phantasmagoric. “If you lose your values,” Dorfman went on, “you will not be able to tell the difference between your inner and your outer life, between the fictions that others weave around you and your own consciousness.”

This is precisely what happens to Graham Blake, CEO of a vast empire, and hero (as well as villain and victim) of Blake's Therapy. Dorfman is too shrewd to make Blake a stereotypical avatar of greed; on the contrary, his company, Clean Earth, is a “leader in biodiversity, global excellence, responsibility. ‘We Change Mother Earth Without Hurting Her.’” In a sly satirical echo of a former General Motors president, Blake declares in all earnestness, “What's good for the earth, is good for the Company.” Blake hasn't utterly lost his values, but the enigmatic, invisible ruling powers (the same that loom in Kafka and Orwell) are doing their utmost to see he does. Thus his “therapy,” an excruciating concoction of intrigue and torturous manipulation.

Dorfman has devoted his writing life to revealing and excoriating the grosser forms of torture. Born in Buenos Aires and raised in the United States until the age of 12, he became a naturalized Chilean citizen in 1964, and wrote, taught, and produced radio and television programs under the Salvador Allende government. In 1973, when Allende was ousted and succeeded by Pinochet, Dorfman was forced into exile. He returned to the United States, where he teaches at Duke University.

Of necessity, Dorfman was bicultural (and bilingual) before it became fashionable. He was also one of the earliest writers to apply political analysis to popular culture: How to Read Donald Duck (1975, written with Armand Mattelart) and The Empire's Old Clothes (1996) decipher capitalist and imperialist subtexts in Disney characters, or Babar and the Lone Ranger, among others. (Nowadays such deconstructions are no longer surprising; the only surprise is that anything at all significant is still found in Disney's inanities.) Dorfman's acclaimed 1991 play, Death and the Maiden, is a painful exploration of how a restored democracy in Chile should best deal with the ex-torturers. His novels range from the vast and sprawling, streaked with the magical realism of his fellow Latin Americans (The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, 1987, Mascara, 1988) to the short and stark (Widows, 1983, discreetly set in Greece but actually about Chile's disappeared). Blake's Therapy is in the short, stark mode; despite some marring confusions and anomalies, it is a powerful shock to the system, like being plunged into a vat of ice.

Graham Blake is coming apart when we meet him. He trembles, hasn't slept in three months, suffers from a perpetual headache. And all because, under pressure to downsize, he has made the difficult, unpopular, yet seemingly humane decision to maintain the small, old-fashioned plant in Philadelphia left to him by his father. This was the germ of his empire and remains his nostalgic connection to a simpler past. The choice leaves Clean Earth Corporation in danger of a takeover by an unscrupulous rival, and frustrates Blake's associates, especially his partner and ex-wife, Jessica. She is the scientific brains behind the corporation, while Blake is the managerial know-how, the charm, the public relations—and the would-be benevolent dictator.

Enter Dr. Tolgate, the evil genius and latter-day Virgil who guides Blake through the stages of a treatment designed for corporate executives beset by moral crisis (the epigraphs to the novel's three sections are from Dante, but its path descends from deep to deeper inferno). Tolgate whisks Blake off to Philadelphia and installs—strictly speaking, confines—him in an apartment with hidden cameras trained on the other side of the wall. Next door lives Roxanna, a beautiful young Puerto Rican nurse who works in the factory in question, and her family. Roxanna, Tolgate announces, will be Blake's therapy. She and her family have been specially selected to fit his psychological needs, like joints in their sockets. Though a virtual prisoner, Blake has a staff at his command and full power to control the family's fate according to his whims. He yearns to be a good man, or rather, to feel he's a good man. Here is his chance, says Tolgate, to learn his true nature. Given the opportunity, what kind of God will Blake choose to play?

At first, like the many executives who have preceded him, Blake refuses: The plan is immoral, he's leaving. But once the camera shows Roxanna, whose slow grace and natural healing powers signify the antithesis of corporate culture, he is hooked. Watching her in bed with her boyfriend leaves him so fraught with sexual jealousy that he arranges for the man to be arrested on the spot, on phony drug charges. And so it goes. Soon Blake has Roxanna's father fired from his security job, ruins her mother's food stand, and banishes an idle family hanger-on. Ultimately, he assures himself, he'll give them all a happy ending. Meanwhile, he grows to relish the allure of power and full surveillance.

Blake comes to his senses only when his machinations drive Roxanna to a suicide attempt he witnesses through the hidden camera. Overcome with remorse, he crosses the forbidden barrier into the next apartment to save her and to confess—only to find the entire scenario has been just that: a series of scenes performed by actors, to elicit and test his moral fiber. He is cured, Tolgate proclaims. Blake has proven himself a good man who would do no lasting damage. He can go home to carry on his corporate duties with a clear conscience.

Blake believes his therapy is over, but it has just begun. Now he finds himself addicted to surveillance. He places hidden cameras everywhere, spies on his lover, his children, his colleagues. Still entranced by Roxanna—or by the idea of Roxanna—he returns to Philadelphia to find the real woman she was based on. Rose Montero, from Colombia, is not quite as beautiful as the actress who played Roxanna, but far more authentic. Disguising his identity, he befriends her family; this time he will use his power for good, to improve their lot. But events eerily accelerate. When a strike at the factory threatens, Jessica implores Blake to behave sensibly (that is, corporately), not sentimentally. The early scenario repeats itself as Rose attempts suicide and again Blake runs to the rescue.

Are Rose and her family actors too, merely another phase of Blake's therapy? It appears that way. “Everybody in the world is acting out some sort of role, Mr. Blake,” Tolgate tells him. “The question is who writes our words: if we write them or somebody else does. Is there any doubt that this is the matter we really need to address: who is in control?”

So the layers of deception, control and surveillance are unfathomable. Dorfman has set up a conundrum that brings Blake to the point where he cannot distinguish between his “inner and … outer life, between the fictions that others weave around [him] and [his] own consciousness.” Yet even in the grip of Tolgate and the powers he reports to (possibly Blake's business rival, or his best friend, or Rose's father, or Jessica, or none of the above), Blake tries to protest: “I deal with, affect, millions of people around the world. You deal with just a few.” “Yes,” says Tolgate, “but the few I deal with determine what happens to those millions.”

Armed—or weakened—by this knowledge, Blake heads into the crucial corporate meeting that will settle the fate of the factory, indeed of Clean Earth itself. Does he stick to his humanitarian guns and keep the factory open? Do the businesslike thing and close it? Or, just as likely, jump out the window in despair? You, dear reader, must decide. Dorfman has spoken in interviews of his taste for open-ended fiction, but Blake's Therapy is a bit too open-ended. Gratifying as it is to see so timely an issue nailed and dramatized, it would be even better to know where Dorfman thinks it is headed.

The teasing conclusion and a few needlessly baffling passages are irritating. Nevertheless, Blake's Therapy enriches the genre of nightmarish social parable; like the best such works, it unfolds in an ambiance of unbearable anxiety, where fragile individual identity is crushed by huge abstract power. Its corporate setting happens to be supremely pertinent for our age, but this novel's real and enduring locale is the darkness within.