In desperation he becomes the patient of Thérèse Goldschmidt, a therapist who is herself the child of Holocaust survivors. She is adamant that Doriel talk about his parents, who died shortly after the war, a crushing loss that capped the traumas of his childhood.
Doriel sometimes thinks he is possessed by a dybbuk, one of those lost souls of the dead that take over a living body. Thérèse is openly mystified by his illness, but is convinced one of the keys to it lies in the loneliness of his life, almost devoid of close relationships. Yet one of Doriel's strongest convictions is that even though he is past 60, he will still fall in love. He will know her when he sees her: She will have "the smile of a frightened child."
All of this - the components of "A Mad Desire to Dance" - could have been the makings of a wonderful book, a beautiful story of recovery or a great religious novel in a league with Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer." What we have instead is a series of vivid episodes and passages of beautiful prose that do not pull together as a novel.
"A Mad Desire to Dance," by celebrated writer, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, would have benefited from the deletion of many scenes: for example, the passages in which Doriel is recruited to work for the Mossad (he turns them down) and the character Laurent's recollections of his experiences in the French Resistance.
But no number of judicious excisions could have saved this book from its central flaws: undeveloped characters, narrative disjointedness, and a staggering lack of plausibility.
The bulk of the book is taken up by Doriel's sessions with Thérèse, which serve as the vehicle for telling us about his past. But Thérèse herself - even though there are chapters narrated by her - remains a relatively shadowy persona. And although her husband appears repeatedly in the book, he barely seems a character at all. He's the prose equivalent of a stick figure. Eventually Thérèse, who has been with us virtually from the novel's beginning, rather abruptly ends her treatment of Doriel and we hear nothing more from her. It's a jarring narrative break.
