Dorfman brilliantly conflates notions of reality and make-believe in his plays, especially Death and the Maiden (1992), and in his novels, including The Nanny and the Iceberg (1999). In this tautly strung tale—in which Orwellian skepticism is spiked with Hitchcockian suspense and tempered with magic realism—his provocative blend of intellectual high jinks and political awareness achieves a vigorous complexity. Graham Blake, a revered CEO whose Clean Earth Company seems to prove that big business can be socially responsible, is slowly losing his edge and possibly his mind. He ends up at the Corporate Life Therapy Institute at the mercy of its wily director, Dr. Tolgate. Tolgate’s Machiavellian treatment appears to utilize a particularly diabolical form of “reality” TV, in which the participants, in this case a sexy Latina healer named Roxanne and her family, are subjected to intrusive surveillance without their consent. Then again, they may be only actors. Either way, Blake is given godlike powers over their lives and nearly succumbs to the debilitating eroticism of voyeuristic sadism. As his hero struggles against his baser instincts, Dorfman adroitly ponders questions of morality in the pell-mell age of globalism. --Donna Seaman

(Booklist/May 1, 2001)