George Prochnik's I Dream with Open Eyes is a bookend to Home/Land, the 2022 book written by his wife, New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead, about their decision to move with their teenage son from New York City to London in the summer of 2018. But where Mead's book focuses on her reabsorption into the native land she'd left 30 years earlier, Prochnik chooses to wrestle with the moral dilemma of what it would mean to continue to live in a country that could elect Donald Trump as its president. The result is a thoughtful, if sometimes challenging, journey through that process.
While the intellectual tapestry Prochnik (The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World) weaves is complex and variegated, the life and work of Sigmund Freud is one of its central themes. At the core of the memoir is an account of the early 20th-century debate between Prochnik's great-grandfather James Jackson Putnam, a distinguished psychologist and neurologist from Boston, and his mentor Freud, which pitted Putnam's "idealistic faith in human nature" against Freud's "dark, worldly view, which despaired of humanity en masse and its respective experiments in civilization." As he has throughout his life, Prochnik finds himself "torn between these disjunctive perspectives" with increasing urgency.
Ultimately, Prochnik admits, his comfortable life in the U.S. came to feel "like a space capsule cut off from the mothership, hurtling through the darkness in freefall." While the internal landscape many Americans traverse certainly will differ from his, with future elections looming, the decision he faced may become an equally pressing one for others. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer