I DREAM WITH OPEN EYES

A chronicle of a family’s fraught decision to leave America.

In 2016, shock and dismay over Donald Trump’s election incited for Prochnik several years of intense deliberation about whether to leave the U.S. with his wife and son. Although Trump “was indubitably the match to the fuse” and the “symbol that signified an actual, irreclaimable loss,” his discontent had begun earlier and had deep roots, which he explores in an erudite examination of heritage, home, the meaning of his life’s work, and his place in the world. Living in upscale Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the author became disillusioned both with the fraying social fabric and “the self-involvement” and “entitlement” that he saw around him. Furthermore, his job was unsatisfying. For nearly 20 years, he had worked at a public relations agency, promoting “lies and deceit. I allowed myself to become the voice of people I despised, or who had money enough not to have to speak for themselves. I sold the aspect of myself I cared for most deeply.” He had long felt torn between two strands of his intellectual inheritance: one, the “idealistic faith in human nature” held by psychologist and neurologist James Jackson Putnam, the author’s great-grandfather; the other, “the tidal tug of Freud’s dark, worldly view which despaired of humanity en masse and its respective experiments in civilization.” His mother’s family had come over on the Mayflower, linking him “to the country’s founding fantasy: the creation of a holy nation in the wilderness.” His father’s prosperous Viennese Jewish family “had barely escaped the Nazis.” From Titian to the surrealists, Stefan Zweig to Walter Benjamin, H.D. to Elizabeth Bishop, Prochnik draws on art, philosophy, literature, and heavily on Freud as he contemplates his “longing to move to a different moment in history” and to change his life—and his son’s—“instead of just being forced to submit to the ways the world was changing so alarmingly around us.”

A dark, brooding, and highly literate meditation.