Stefan Merrill Block: Out with the skeletons

Stefan Merrill Block appears to be trying to understand his own periodic oddness. Photo / Supplied

A writer fills in the gaps in his family's dubious past, writes Nicky Pellegrino.

I found it a frustrating experience reading Stefan Merrill Block's second novel The Storm At The Door (Faber, $36.99). In many ways this is an extraordinary piece of fiction and yet never have I so wanted to pick up an editor's red pen and get to work. Take this sentence in the opening chapter: "Katharine passes through the musty, tenebrous living room, which always seems resentful of sunlight, seems to be the place nighttime gathers to hide from the summer's unblinking sun stare."

This is a complicated way of saying that the room lacking light is symbolic and, though it's symbolic and Block is setting up his story about the dark places inside all of us, it's overdone and his use of words too creative-writing-class clever for me

Although I didn't always find his prose style pleasing, I remain impressed by this novel and here's why.

Block has written, from his own point of view, a fictionalised version of his grandparent's history, taking us inside the imagined emotional lives of these two troubled people, brilliantly and memorably.

His grandmother Katharine has rushed into a wartime marriage with handsome and charming Frederick Merrill but there is another side to the man, as she soon discovers.

Alcohol abuse, infidelities, peculiar public behaviour: she suffers in silence. Then Frederick is arrested one night for drunkenly flashing at motorists and, with her family's support, she commits him to high-end Boston mental asylum the Mayflower for the "rest" he needs.

The depiction of Frederick's period of incarceration is vivid and utterly involving. Surrounding by crazed mutterers and deranged geniuses he struggles to come to grips with his own instability and to find a way back to the world. Meanwhile Katharine is at the family's lakeside summer cottage trying to keep up appearances and wondering why life is not as perfect as it should be.

This is a story of love gone wrong. It turns the minds of its characters inside out and shows the ragged seam between sanity and madness. Each chapter is prefaced by pictures of the pair - Frederick wearing his naval uniform and Katharine got up in her best fur, both impossibly young and hopeful, which adds to the poignancy.

At some points, almost documentary in style, Block's attempt to understand what his grandfather went through and how his grandmother coped has been informed by interviews with their surviving acquaintances and his reading about mental health institutions and manic depression.

His genius is in the way he brings alive all this information and fills in the gaps with fiction.

So why air so much of his family's dirty laundry? For Block it seems to be a bid to understand his own periodical "strangeness". Has he inherited more from his grandfather than his intellect and writing talent? Is this a mental illness or just the way he is?

This Texas-born author is only 29 and perhaps that explains his unrestrained passion for words. At his hands, the dictionary gets a thorough working over.

As I read I wished he'd pared things back as sometimes the language obscures when it ought to illuminate what is a sensitive and haunting story.