Trauma

February 18, 2008
McGrath (Port Mungo
) manipulates reader expectations expertly in this sharp-edged psychological study of a man deluded by his personal demons. Charlie Weir, a Manhattan psychiatrist, applies the life skills the members of his badly dysfunctional family have helped him hone to counseling patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. While everyone else he knows appears in danger of spinning out of orbit, Charlie exudes the calmness and confidence of a man in control of his circumstances. But he's unable to connect emotionally with the women in his life, and he repeatedly revisits his memory of the suicide of his ex-wife's brother, who was also one of his patients. With painstaking precision, McGrath drives this story to a climactic, if hastily resolved, moment of self-revelation in which Charlie uncovers a forgotten personal trauma that has perverted his perceptions and made him the most unreliable of narrators. Notwithstanding these efforts to give Charlie's tale the jolt of a psychological thriller, this is a haunting story of a man in the grip of a painful and beautifully articulated spiritual malaise.

May 1, 2008
McGrath's ("Port Mongo") latest tale concerns Charlie, a psychiatrist, and his dysfunctional life and family. A distant father and alcoholic mother have left their marks on him, his rivalry with older brother Walter has festered unabated for years, and Charlie gamely maintains on-again, off-again relationships with his ex-wife, Agnes, and his sometime lover, Nora. Agnes's brother committed suicide while Charlie was treating him for post-traumatic stress disorder, one of the many ghosts haunting the cobwebby mansion of Charlie's mind. Frequent references to Manhattan's East Sixties, the Son of Sam case, and passing glimpses of the World Trade Center make this very much a New York novel. The denouement will not surprise longtime readers of McGrath's fiction, though it probably won't surprise many other readers either. This is a book more to be admired than embraced. The uncompromising development of its initial premise is carried out with a chilly skill that exactly duplicates the professional approach of its central character, the "alienist." Recommended for all public libraries east of the Hudson and for others where literary fiction is in demand.Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO

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