Cards of Identity by Nigel DENNIS

The entire story centers around the Identity Club, a group of psychoanalysts who come together once a year to discuss phony identity cases which don't involve real patients. At the same time, the local townspeople are being brainwashed into believing they are servants for the psychologists. They lose their identities in order to serve the whims of the shrinks. The end of the story, which I never got to, involves a Shakespearean play. For me, the plot disintegrated midway through the story and I gave up. It started off great. The slow brain washing was sinister in places. Miss Paradise's brother goes missing and she doesn't recognize him as the therapists's servant. Or calling the doctor by different names in order to confuse him. Both scenarios were funny and evil and brilliant. ( )

Cards of Identity is a scathing satire of psychology, identity
theory, and class prejudice. The plot centers on an annual meeting of the Identity Club, a group of psychologists who come together to present "case histories" promoting their chosen theory of identity. These case studies (three of which are presented in the novel) are not scientific treatises, but fictional representations of character in line with the author's biases. In fact, members of the Club aren't allowed to interact with actual patients when creating their stories. Surrounding this meeting is the equally bizarre story of the local townspeople, who are brainwashed and transformed into servants for the convention, and who end the book with a show-stopping, Shakespearian play.

Nigel Dennis was the author of three novels, including A Sea Change, and A House in Order, three plays, and several books of
essays. Although born in Surrey, Dennis spent much of his early adulthood in the U.S. reviewing books for the New Republic and Time. He also translated works of the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, which provided him with material for Cards of Identity.

Time: One of the funniest, most penetrating novels since the early Aldous Huxley.

Edmund Fuller - New York Times Book Review: A novel of fiendish ingenuity. It will make you laugh, it will make you wince, and it may just possibly make you crawl under the bedclothes forever....Cards of Identity may be remembered and read for some time to come.

Walter Allen - New Statesman and Nation: Cards of Identity is the most considerable attempt at a serious and sizeable satire that we have had for some years. It is witty, full of comic invention and it is packed with fundamental brain-work. There is the added pleasure, too, that Mr. Dennis is something of a literary virtuoso.

Sunday Times London: One of the three or four most mercurially alert, unnervingly funny books to have appeared in the twentieth century.

C. J. Rolo - Atlantic Monthly: Cards of Identity unfolds as a succession of brilliantly ingenious vaudeville turns....There is much in Mr. Dennis's nightmarish entertainment which is both blazingly funny and savagely penetrating.

Nigel Dennis-no kin of mine, alas-tells a very funny story packed with secret smiles, soft snickers, and hearty laughter. His writing recalls Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Angus Wilson, and even sometimes George Bernard Shaw, yet it is unmistakably and deliciously original. To read him is to love him.
- Patrick Dennis

I have read no novel published during the last fifteen years with greater pleasure and admiration.
- W H. Auden

An embarrassment of riches, it’s almost too much of a good thing- like making an entire dinner out of cheesecake. The last 15 pages are enough to make it a modern comic classic.