SOURCE: Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. “Corporate Sinners and Crossover Saints.” New Leader 84, no. 3 (May 2001): 35-6.

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...