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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Unsettled by a move with her husband Terry and their young children to Berkeley in the fall of 1959, Margo Sullivan, a part-time portraitist of children, suddenly falls into a manic-depressive cycle, unable to care for her family or to paint. As she loses her delicate grasp on reality, her relations with Terry, her sister and her aloof father change in unsettling ways. A suicide attempt puts Margo in a hospital, where an understanding doctor finally helps restore balance to her precarious situation. While the story is told mainly from Margo's and Terry's points of view, brief, ineffectual narratives by the Sullivan children and several other characters interrupt Margo's own strong telling of her slide from mundane domesticity into madness. McLaughlin ( Lightning in July ) can sometimes turn an evocative phrase ("The sound enclosed us with soft rings that hung, trembling, before they dissolved") and renders Margo and Terry sympathetic characters, but these qualities are ultimately overshadowed by a choppy narrative structure.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

An honest (if programmatic) case study--half love story, half inspirational--of a woman's descent into manic-depression and her family's attempt to cope with her illness. McLaughlin alternates point-of-view between Margo (a mother, wife and artist living in Berkeley who feels that ``something within me had slipped down out of place''), husband Terry (an art historian who teaches and who writes for a magazine of art criticism), children Mikey and Laura, sitter Nancy, and Margo's sister Liz. Margo's sickness blankets them all; she ``can't seem to get myself organized'' and sees an analyst. But therapy doesn't work, medication doesn't work, and finally Margo--institutionalized and delusional--learns that her own mother committed suicide. That insight provides the key to her eventual ascent into sanity and domestic equilibrium. Meanwhile, the pattern of escalation and eventual (though tentative) cure is fleshed out with a good deal of ordinary detail: Margo trying to keep it together long enough to paint portraits; Terry discovering that his charismatic magazine publisher is a plagiarist; sister-in-law Liz having an affair with the same publisher; Margo's father, a hearty, superficial man, occasionally making an appearance and serving as the deus ex machina at the end with the revelation about his wife's death; Terry getting a shot at a tenure-track position; and Margo, returning home after her descent, getting a new dog to replace the one killed in an accident. As for the writing, it's mostly workmanlike but can be very sloppy: ``...a question that had been burning inside me spurted from my mouth.'' Despite its literary flourishes, this one's more valuable as case history than as fiction. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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