Trauma [Paperback]

Patrick McGrath's "Trauma," is the story of Charlie Weir, a psychiatrist in dire need of his own team of mental health experts. Charlie is a first person narrator whose statements may or may not be entirely accurate. One fact is incontrovertible: His grim childhood living in a dysfunctional household on New York's Upper West Side has permanently scarred him. Charlie's mother was a heavy drinker who was prone to fits of depression; his father, Fred, who was shiftless and abusive, abandoned the family when Charlie was around eight; his older brother, Walt, still treats him with thinly veiled hostility and condescension. Charlie, who specializes in trauma, treats war veterans, victims of sexual abuse, and individuals who have suffered a terrible shock that leaves them crippled because of disturbing symptoms (such as nightmares and flashbacks) that do not diminish over time. Much to his chagrin, Charlie gradually realizes that he is harboring a long-buried secret that continues to haunt him. Even a doctor may unintentionally falsify memories and omit certain events from his psychological landscape because they are too painful to bear.

The author uses flashbacks from the 1970's to set up the conflicts that form the novel's core. During the seventies, Charlie lectured a resentful Walt about his neglect of their mother, who clearly favored her older son. Charlie has managed to wreck his marriage to Agnes, whose brother, an emotionally damaged Vietnam War veteran, had been one of Charlie's patients. Now that he is divorced and living alone, the only bright light in Charlie's life is his daughter, Cassie, whom he sees once a week. As he approaches forty, he fears that his isolation from meaningful human contact may be a sign that he is as deeply troubled as his patients. Although he tries to immerse himself in his work and even forms a relationship with a woman named Nora, Charlie is inexorably moving on a downward slope. He has never completely come to terms with the demons that have taken up permanent residence in his soul.

McGrath is a craftsman whose lucid and beautifully expressed prose propels this tightly written narrative. The symbolic references to the World Trade Center and the Vietnam War, which are recurring motifs, suggests that the unstable world we live in contributes to the scourge of mental illness that afflicts so many. Through Charlie, the author intimates that the Vietnam War "was meaningless and unnecessary.... The irony was that fighting for your country made you unfit to be its citizen." Furthermore, "America played the part of a mad god eager to devour its young, the willing slave of its own death instinct." New York City is portrayed at its most unappealing. "I was horrified at the decay into which the city had sunk, and if the worst of it fell on the poor....that was nothing compared to what was happening to the mentally ill."

At the heart of the novel is the power of the human mind to turn against itself. Although we have come to accept Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum, "What does not kill me, makes me stronger," the author offers a different scenario. It is entirely possible that "what does not kill me lies in wait in my subconscious to ambush me when I am at my weakest and most vulnerable." "Trauma" has well-defined characters, steadily building suspense, and compassion for the suffering that permeates its pages. What it lacks is the promise of redemption from the horrors that lie in wait for so many of the walking wounded.

A cynical psychologist of my acquaintance referred to one of his colleagues who'd had several suicides among his patients as "double 0 seven- He has a license to kill!"
Of course, making cheap jokes on crazy mental health professionals is easy, as is making broad camp caricature. What Patrick McGrath does here is so much more subtle. Of course, with this author, you never know just how self deceiving or malicious his narrator may be, so CAREFUL reading is in order. Still, his tale is compassionate and actually teaches us something about empathy and compassion while his characters blunder towards that dreamed of state of grace.
I hope you haven't read too many plot descriptions as this is a story best told by Patrick McGrath himself. This is a great read.

McGrath has created an evocative, shadowed mystery all the more compelling for the fact that it is born in childhood experience, young Charlie Weir the heir of a dysfunctional family that ultimately casts him in the role of caretaker. With parents that lash out at one another and a gregarious brother who seeks his identity outside their troubled home, Charlie is the de facto caretaker of his alcoholic, depressed mother, who pens somewhat successful mysteries in her later years, ever praising older son, Walt, a successful artist, while denigrating Charlie's efforts to bring a modicum of peace and order to his mother's self-destructive days. While Fred Weir abandons his family for a younger woman and a wasted life of philandering, Charlie is the only one willing to step into the breech and protect the family from complete disintegration. It is no surprise, then, that in the 1970s Charlie should become a doctor who specializes in treating the mental disorders of returning Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD.

One of these damaged vets, Danny, is the focus of Charlie's professional energy, the young man severely traumatized by what he has seen- and done- while in service to his country. Danny's sister, Agnes, is an unexpected gift to the young doctor; Charlie and Agnes marry and have a daughter, Cassie, embracing the tormented Danny as a part of their small family. But Danny's slow disintegration ultimately takes a toll on the marriage, Charlie unable to comfort Agnes when she most needs him. His work becomes salvation until his mother's death, when Charlie's careful house of cards comes crashing down: he assumes her chronic depression, a cloak of dread that weighs upon every aspect of his life. Charlie finds brief respite in Agnes' kindness and a chaotic romance with an equally-damaged Nora Chiara; but Charlie soon realizes that the needy Nora, while thrilling and seductive, is an emotional burden he cannot carry.

In an effort at self-preservation, Charlie changes jobs and location, drawn to a familiar place to confront his family drama. Subconsciously searching for safety, Charlie comes face to face with his own truth. His protagonist the heart of this complex psychological thriller, McGrath exposes the layers of denial and pain that have shielded Charlie Weir from the memory he fears. The human mind as dark and many-chambered as any nightmarish crime scene, this illness is far more subtle and pervasive, turning a well-meant life into a series of painful episodes that batter Charlie's psyche and leave him unable to navigate the world. Facing his brother, Walt, and an indifferent father in a heart-stopping moment of reckoning, Charlie's harrowing confrontation with the past is long overdue, his path strewn with loss and disappointment. A broken man, Charlie must find the strength to save the child he once was from a long-buried memory, to return to a life worth sustaining. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

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