Constance
Patrick McGrath, 2013
Bloomsbury USA
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781608199433
Summary
The cool, beautiful Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan in the early 1960s. At a literary party, she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior.
Sidney is a single father with a poor marital record, and he pursues Constance with relentless determination. Eventually she surrenders, accepts his marriage proposal, and moves, with some dread, into his dark, book-filled apartment.
She can't settle in. She's tortured by memories of the bitterly unhappy childhood she spent with her father in a dilapidated house upstate. When she learns devastating new information about that past, Constance's fragile psyche suffers a profound shock. Her marriage, already tottering, threatens to collapse completely.
Frightened, desperate, and alone, Constance makes a disastrous decision and then looks on as her world rapidly falls apart. Her only consolation, as the city swelters in an interminable heat wave, is the friendship of Sidney's son, Howard, a strange, delicate child, not unlike Constance herself.
The story of a marriage in crisis and a family haunted by trauma, Constance is also a tale of resilience and loyalty, and of the moral inspiration that can lead even the most lost of souls back to the light. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 7, 1950
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Stonyhurst College
• Awards—Premio Flaiano Prize (Italy)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York, USA
Patrick McGrath is a British novelist whose work has been categorized as gothic fiction. He was born in London, grew up near Broadmoor Hospital where his father was Medical Superintendent, and was educated at Stonyhurst College.
He is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Asylum (1996), Martha Peake (2000), Port Mungo (2004), Trauma (2008), and Spider (1990), which was adapted into a 2002 David Cronenberg film. His fiction is principally characterised by the first person unreliable narrator, and recurring subject matter in his work includes mental illness, repressed homosexuality and adulterous relationships. His novel Martha Peake won the Premio Flaiano Prize in Italy.
He is married to actress Maria Aitken and lives in New York City. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6//4/2013.)
Book Reviews
[T]he novel's effects are oddly, cumulatively hypnotic. As a piece of monomaniacal writing, McGrath's strange narrative never fails to grip and startle. But as a study of emotional and sexual anesthesia, of marital numbness, of the ways in which family obsession and love—or the lack of it—can wreak havoc on a person's psychological and sexual development, it's a tour de force…[an] unforgettable book.
Julie Meyerson - New York Times Book Review
McGrath demonstrates the power of his craft with a thoroughly unlikable protagonist, hell bent on not only her own destruction but also that of everyone around her, escalating a pattern of familial dysfunction that she has the power to stop, yet chooses not to. ... [I]t’s difficult to understand [her stepson] Sidney’s motivations for wanting to save her; she doesn’t seem worth saving. Despite McGrath’s demonstrable skill, the reader will be left with mild irritation rather than catharsis.
Publishers Weekly
Unhappy families being unhappy in their own way...again. McGrath's hyperanalytical approach to traumatic family relationships runs deep. Constance Schuyler, a cool, iconic blonde in a Hitchcock-ian mold, lives in New York.... Although Constance seems to hate her father...her marriage to Sidney suggests she's looking for a father replacement.... Throughout the novel, McGrath moves us from Constance's to [her stepson] Sidney's point of view, sometimes lurching the novel forward by having them use the same words to characterize what's happening in their lives. A novel of fierce rages and great tenderness, exhausting in its emotional intensity.
Kirkus Reviews
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