books
Page 36
Friday, september 3, 2010
Psychosis fiction The following titles will take you on a thrilling psychological rollercoaster on a crazy journey - literally crazy. In the wards of hospitals and behind the locked doors of asylums, these heroes and heroines will keep your long summer day occupied. Enjoy the ride and send your suggestions to hussain@kuwaittimes.net
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest By Ken Kesey
Girl, Interrupted By Susanna Kaysen
A
I
I Know This Much Is True
The Secret Scripture
By Wally Lamb
By Sebastian Barry
B
A
n international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, lifeaffirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy’s revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results. With One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become and enduring favorite of readers.
oth a moving character study and a gripping story of family conflict are hidden somewhere inside the daunting bulk of this annoyingly slick second novel by Lamb. The character (and narrator) is Dominick Birdsey, a 40-yearold housepainter whose subdued life in his hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, is disturbed in 1990 when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic whose condition is complicated by religious mania, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. The story is that of the embattled Birdseys, as recalled in Dominick’s elaborate memory-flashbacks and in the ‘autobiography’ (juxtaposed against the primary narrative) of the twins’ maternal grandfather, Italian immigrant (and tyrannical patriarch) Domenico Tempesta. But Lamb combines these promising materials with overattenuated accounts of Dominick’s crippled past (the torments inflicted on him and Thomas by an abusive stepfather, a luckless marriage, the crib death of his infant daughter), and with a heavy emphasis on the longconcealed identity of the twins’ real fathera mystery eventually solved, not, as Dominick and we expect, in Domenico’s selfaggrandizing story, but by a most surprising confession. This novel is derivative (of both Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides and the film Dominick and Eugene), it pushes all the appropriate topical buttons (child abuse, AIDS, New Age psychobabble, Native American dignity, and others), and it works a little too hard at wringing tears. But it’s by no means negligible. Lamb writes crisp, tender-tough dialogue, and his portrayal of the decent, conflicted Dominick (who is forced, and blessed, to acknowledge that ‘We were all, in a way, each other’) is convincing. The pathetic, destroyed figure of Thomas is, by virtue of its very opacity, both haunting and troubling.
n 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clearsighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
subtle study of psychology, religion, family and politics in Ireland. This is not, as the title might suggest, another Da Vinci Code clone. Barry (A Long Long Way, 2005, etc.) writes vigorously and passionately about his native land. The story is told antiphonally, alternating narratives between a secret journal (hidden beneath the floorboard) kept by Roseanne McNulty, a patient in a mental hospital, and the “Commonplace Book” of her psychiatrist Dr. Grene, who’s dealing with serious issues of grief after the death of his wife. Roseanne has always been something of an outsider, her father a cemetery-keeper and rat-catcher but most importantly a Protestant in a land largely hostile to this religious orientation. Although Roseanne remembers a happy childhood, in which she was the proverbial apple of her father’s eye, he becomes involved in the political and military entanglements of Irish political life. When Roseanne grows up, she becomes the wife of Tom McNulty, but through a series of misunderstandings-as well as through the machinations of the grim-faced and soul-destroying priest, Fr. Gaunt-she is as good as accused (though falsely) of adultery with the son of a political rebel. Out of malice toward Protestants as well as out of a misplaced moral absolutism, Fr. Gaunt has her marriage annulled-and, using nymphomania to explain her “condition,” has her locked up in the asylum. Dr. Grene gets interested in her story as well as her history, and in tracking down her past he finds a secret that she has kept hidden for many years, a secret that affects them both and that intertwines their families. In a final assessment of Roseanne-after she’s spent decades in the asylum-Dr. Grene determines that she is “blameless.” She responds: “ Blameless? I hardly think that is given to any mortal being.’” Indeed, blamelessness is a state no one achieves in this novel. Barry beautifully braids together the convoluted threads of his narrative.