One has to be careful reviewing a novel by Patrick McGrath. From the first page, he begins laying clues and dropping hints about the bomb he’s going to drop on readers at the end of the book, though he’s also clever enough that some of his hints and clues lead to false trails, a feat particularly easy when he manipulates the device of the unreliable narrator as well as he does (and perhaps turns that device inside out). So a reviewer constantly has to parse what he’s revealing to make certain not to give away the multi-layered game.
Let’s say this: Patrick McGrath’s new novel “Trauma” (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95) is narrated by a psychiatrist — as was “Asylum,” his fourth novel — who cannot follow the dictum, “Physician, heal thyself,” though he understands that some horror hidden inside is making his life increasingly untenable. The setting is New York in the 1970s and ’80s; Charlie Weir specializes in treating Vietnam veterans and other patients suffering from post-traumatic syndrome. One of the most traumatized of his clients is Danny Magill, whose terrors brought back from Vietnam leave him almost silent, strenuously alcoholic and severely depressed.
The novel begins with the death of Charlie’s theatrical, needy, depressive mother, who had been abandoned years before by her shiftless husband. At her funeral, Charlie sees his former wife, Agnes, whom he left (along with their daughter) seven years ago after the suicide of her brother — yes, Danny, the haunted Vietnam vet. Gradually, as the chronology shifts back and forth, against a backdrop of Danny’s increasing violence and death (Charlie finds him with most of his head blown off), of Charlie’s guilt about Danny’s suicide and his feeling that Agnes can never forgive him, we learn more about Charlie’s horrendously dysfunctional family, the enmity between him and his brother and about incidents from his childhood whose psychic wounds fester deep within, so deep that even as a psychiatrist he cannot see what they are, though he feels the effects more and more dramatically. The novel’s narrative flaw is that the revelation of what Charlie’s trauma really is and who dealt it to him is handled almost summarily: Whoop! There it is! End of story!
There’s a point in “Trauma” at which readers may want to call Suspended Disbelief Inc. and order a truckload of that stuff delivered to their door-steps. That’s the point (for me, anyway) at which the re-married Agnes, offering solace (but still mistrustful), comes back into Charlie’s life and bed, at the same time as he launches an affair with the beautiful, troubled Nora Chiara, who is introduced to Charlie by his brother. If you can wrap your mind around this erotic juxtaposition and its complex network of anger and blame, you won’t have a problem with the book.
Fortunately, McGrath makes it pretty easy to become absorbed in Charlie’s descent into the hell of guilt, isolation and near-madness. Unlike the prose in McGrath’s previous novels, “Port Mungo” and “Martha Peake,” where the author fully indulged his talent for verbal intensity on a Grand Guignol scale, the writing in “Trauma” is appropriately deft, straightforward and punchy. New York, quickly etched, has never seemed wearier, more jungle-like or squalid than in McGrath’s hands. It’s a suitable backdrop for a tale that follows a Freudian path into the fiery furnaces of family life in which trauma is forged that can neither be forgiven nor forgotten.
Patrick McGrath will be at Burke’s Book Store Wednesday from 5 to 6:30 p.m., with a reading of “Trauma” at 6. The store is at 936 S. Cooper, in the Cooper-Young neighborhood. Call 278-7484.
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