The Storm at the Door

Starred review from March 21, 2011
Block (The Story of Forgetting) fictionalizes the story of his grandparents in this incredibly moving story of life, love, and mental illness. Frederick is an eccentric, depressed alcoholic who chooses a stint at the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill (a fictionalized McLean Psychiatric Hospital) over being jailed for flashing a car. What Frederick cannot expect is that he will remain a prisoner there, at the mercy of his fed-up wife, Katharine, and a series of sadistic doctors who are charged with "curing" Frederick and his compatriots at the institution. After he witnesses a series of increasingly gory suicides, Frederick's determination to hold on to normalcy wanesâparticularly after a round of electroshock therapy administered by a physician who only wants Frederick to forget a transgression he witnessed between the doctor and a nurse. Katharine, meanwhile, is forced to face what she has done both to her husband and to her four daughtersâboth in the moment and decades later when Block brings his fictional counterpart into the story. He masterfully pulls the reader through this heartbreaking story, making readers care deeply about what happens to his characters, as flawed as they are at times. It's this generation's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, all the more horrifying because of its real-world inspiration.

April 1, 2011

Through fiction and the imprecision of memory, a writer examines the challenging relationship between his grandparents.

After garnering raves and sales for his first novel, Block (The Story of Forgetting, 2008) once again delves into that murky area between lost love, memory and deeply held melancholy. This round, the author builds his story largely on the true-life history of his grandparents, who found themselves at an impasse when his grandmother had his grandfather committed to a mental institution. The novel opens on Echo Cottage, as the writer contemplates his steely-eyed grandmother, Katharine Mead Merrill, in 1989. At 69, Alzheimer's has started to chip away at long-held memories. Then the story lurches forward to July of 1962, finding the grandfather Frederick Francis Merrill in a drug-induced stupor at the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill, where he has been incarcerated for a long history of drinking, bad behavior and, finally, flashing two old ladies on a New Hampshire back road. Block examines, through cautious language and nearly imperceptible sympathy, the events that have brought the couple from here to there. And it is true that Katherine is in an awful state. "Katherine is a mother of four, with a husband in a mental hospital," Block writes. "The winter is coming, and the money is running out. Her marriage has failed, everyone knows it, and she has no real friends. Her relatives have turned against her husband first, and now they are turning on her too. She can no long be anything other than what everyone plainly sees her to be." But there is sympathy to be unearthed for Frederick, too, as Block expertly captures the frustration and personal devastation wreaked by his grandfather's depression, equally hard on him as it is on his family. As he suffers in the institution he dubs "Horrorland," Katherine begins to reconsider her responsibility for her husband's condition.

A sad but elegantly told story punctuated with photos, letters and a verisimilitude that elevate its fictional ambitions.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from June 1, 2011

Katharine and Frederick Merrill married shortly before Frederick's brief service in World War II, which ended when he was discharged for erratic behavior. After his return home, his efforts as a father and a husband failed miserably, and Katharine, despairing and feeling betrayed, was forced to commit him to Mayflower, an upscale mental hospital, to keep him out of jail. Moving back and forth in time, Block (The Story of Forgetting) takes as his framework his grandparents' volatile marriage, splitting his narrative between Katharine's life as a struggling single mother in the 1960s and Frederick's life in a hospital of brilliant, creative, mentally ill men at the mercy of a dangerous director whose failed attempt to silence Frederick leads to horrific tragedy. VERDICT Taking a true story and building an imagined world of love, mental illness, and the quiet evil of a weak man with power, Block demands a reader's full attention so as not to miss a single, searing moment.--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

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