KEY POINTS:
He's your typical fictional psychiatrist: a professional maestro, a private mess. He's Charlie Weir of New York, who has analysed everyone else's phobias and neuroses, but who can't handle his own clutter of a feckless father, alternately smothering and rejecting mother, belligerent brother, lost wife and child.
Yes, New Yorkers don't do anything by halves. Neither does Patrick McGrath, who was in Wellington for the Writers & Readers Week in March. His novel is a relentless excavation of the sources of anguish and anger, the winding, wounding games people play; the intricate meshing of nature and nurture.
Charlie is nearing 40, isolated, unable to maintain intimacy. Only cool, compassionate Agnes, his ex-wife and the sister of his most dreadful disaster, seems likely to bring some emotional richness to him. The narrative shuttles back and forth across the years as it rakes for causes and solutions.
Charlie remembers the damaged Vietnam veterans with whom he worked, men who feel defiled by what they have seen and who still smell the enemy they killed. He begins a relationship with another woman, who "gave off a faint, subtle suggestion of recent grievous suffering and who has seriously scary nightmares".
Indeed, nobody laughs much in this book. If they do, it's usually because they have drunk a lot. Most of them do drink like drains. They also smoke like old exhausts.
Charlie loses a lover and another patient. There are deaths, shootings, betrayals, conversations like road rage, a melodramatic revelation, an even more melodramatic shooting, before he arrives at what may be a tenuous resolution and redemption - possibly. It all happens in a city slumping into violence and dysfunction, where feral children chase one another through Central Park, shouting obscenities.
There's a fair strew of social and political comment in the story, not all of it assimilated. McGrath writes with much intensity. Occasionally he over-writes with equal intensity: "a new layer of emotion had silted and hardened upon what once had been a virgin bed of trust". Protagonist and author both thread thickets of symbolism.
An old basement is inevitably "a representation of the unconscious mind". Coincidences make Charlie worry about what Freud said. What we call love is actually "our resistance to the prospect of leaving home". Trauma is sometimes portentous and frequently powerful.
A dark pit of a book - lower yourself into it carefully. The experience is both singular and memorable.
* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
Trauma
By Patrick McGrath (Bloomsbury $37.99)
