The Storm At The Door by Stefan Merrill Block
Faber & Faber $36.99
This is a curious book, an involving, sometimes wrenching read that has a provenance and context almost as interesting as the work itself. Block has taken the actuality of his grandparents' lives, primarily his grandfather's incarceration at a mental institution and his grandmother's life as she coped with this, dug up what fact he could, then fleshed it out with fiction. So, while you are aware that a high proportion of what you read is invented, because the premise is factual the whole thing seems real, and is more powerful because of it.
This blurring of fact and fiction isn't a deliberate novelistic ploy by someone who has attended too many university creative writing courses: it's a necessity. There's just too much missing to create a fully factual rendering of a remarkable relationship.
And that is the core of the book: what went missing.
The words her husband Frederick wrote with charcoal on the cold floor of solitary at the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill are what Block's grandmother Katharine is burning, erasing, killing in 1989 as the book opens. And what he has written is, in a way, what young Block recreates: Frederick's story, his explanation of his bizarre, sometimes drunkenly explained, sometimes unexplainable actions. "Frederick at any moment, could be one or more of many things: malevolent, loving, brilliant, drunk, visionary. The opening of potential selves like first kisses that soon fail to deliver what they seemed to promise."
