The Storm at the Door: A Novel [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Stefan Merrill Block (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 21, 2011

The past is not past for Katharine Merrill. Even after two decades of volatile marriage, Katharine still believes she can have the life that she felt promised to her by those first exhilarating days with her husband, Frederick. For two months, just before Frederick left to fight in World War II, Katharine received his total attentiveness, his limitless charms, his astonishing range of intellect and wit. Over the years, however, as Frederick’s behavior and moods have darkened, Katharine has covered for him, trying to rein in his great manic passions and bridge his deep wells of sadness: an unending project of keeping up appearances and hoping for the best. But the project is failing. Increasingly, Frederick’s erratic behavior, amplified by alcohol, distresses Katharine and their four daughters and gives his friends and family cause to worry for his sanity. When, in the summer of 1962, a cocktail party ends with her husband in handcuffs, Katharine makes a fateful decision: She commits Frederick to Mayflower Home, America’s most revered mental asylum.

There, on the grounds of the opulent hospital populated by great poets, intellectuals, and madmen, Frederick tries to transform his incarceration into a creative exercise, to take each meaningless passing moment and find the art within it. But as he lies on his room’s single mattress, Frederick wonders how he ever managed to be all that he once was: a father, a husband, a business executive. Under the faltering guidance of a self-obsessed psychiatrist, Frederick and his fellow patients must try to navigate their way through a gray zone of depression, addiction, and insanity.

Meanwhile, as she struggles to raise four young daughters, Katharine tries to find her way back to Frederick through her own ambiguities, delusions, and the damages done by her rose-colored belief in a life she no longer lives.

Inspired by elements of the lives of the author’s grandparents, this haunting love story shifts through time and reaches across generations. Along the way, Stefan Merrill Block stunningly illuminates an age-old truth: even if one’s daily life appears ordinary, one can still wage a silent, secret, extraordinary war.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Storm at the Door is one of the bravest and most beautiful books I have ever read.  It's a wholly original hybrid --by turns a fictional account of the love story of Frederick and Katharine Merrill, a terrifying tour of the "horrorland" of the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill, a lucid translation of madness, and a grandson's quest to understand "the blank page" of his family's past.   Stefan Merrill Block's language soars--he's got a wingspan that covers three generations. Refusing to be "paralyzed by fact," Block moves nimbly between fact and fiction, history and the imagination, to get at truths that are almost unbearable: that love can fail, that a mind can immolate, and that language can sometimes leave us lonelier than our original silence. This is a powerful, enthralling and unforgettable book." 
 
-- Karen Russell, New York Times bestselling author of Swamplandia!
 
"The Storm at the Door is a fascinating exploration of Stefan Merrill Block's family history, both of what actually and what might've happened following his grandmother's fateful decision to commit his manic depressive grandfather to a mental institution. Told with intelligence, a poetic ear for language, and empathy, The Storm at the Door is a captivating story about separation and enduring love."
 
--Lisa Genova, New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice
 
“The Storm at the Door is a brilliant and passionate examination of the outer limits of language, sanity, and the human heart. At its center is the heartbreaking love story of a writer's lost grandparents, an enduring marriage interrupted by madness, sustained by language and memories. Stefan Merrill Block is an amazing writer, at once cerebral and tender, lyrical and profound. The Storm at the Door is an enthrallingly original book.”
 
--Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
 
“Lucid, intelligent, passionate, this beautifully orchestrated novel reaches half a century back in time and reverts to the present in order to show three generations struggling to cope with the consequences of a grandfather’s madness that may or may not have been real.  The visual images of this book are burned into my memory.  The style is masterful. But most important the compassion that reconstructs the painful past and analyzes the uncertain present is unflagging and deeply admirable.  Stefan Merrill Block is a brilliant young author who has turned out a nearly perfect work of art.”
 
-- Edmund White, author of City Boy and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
 
“One way to read The Storm at the Door is as an extended meditation on Robert Lowell’s poem, “Waking in Blue,” written when the poet was a psychiatric patient at McLean Hospital.  Another way is as a novel about corrosive family secrets. Yet another is as a slant re-telling of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In actual fact, it’s a brilliant and fascinating fusion of all three.” 
 
-- Mary Jo Bang, author of Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
 
"Stefan Block's heart-wrenching tale of love and madness cuts through the insulating layers of American life until it's rubbing up against the bare essence of humanity.  The writing is that good, the characters that strong.  Never has a true story been imagined so beautifully."  
 
-- David Goodwillie, author of American Subversive
 
"In this gorgeous and heartbreaking novel, Stefan Merrill Block has achieved something rare and magnificent: A sympathetic and utterly realistic portrait of depression, that will ring true with anyone who has suffered from its crushing weight. That he has also managed to perfectly capture the joys and tedium of marriage and family life is only a testament to this young writer’s extraordinary and evolving talent."
 
-- Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age
 

About the Author

Stefan Merrill Block is the author of The Story of Forgetting. He was born in 1982 and grew up in Plano, Texas. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2004. This is his second novel. He lives in Brooklyn.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Random House (June 21, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400069459
• ISBN-13: 978-1400069453
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Novel on Mental Illness from one of the greatest writers of his generation June 21, 2011

By John Kwok HALL OF FAMEVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Stefan Merrill Block's "The Storm at the Door" is an astonishingly original, quite compelling, fictional exploration of mental illness and its devastating impact on a family; a splendid jewel of fiction that establishes him as one of the greatest writers of his generation. It is a most courageous feat of high literary art, not merely because Block has opted to imagine anew the lives of his maternal grandparents, rendering into fiction what others might regard as mere memoir, as those worth noting via his exquisite, often lyrical, prose. It is courageous in examining the legacy of his grandfather's mental illness across the vast gulf of three generations. It is courageous too in its depiction of his grandfather's residency at Mayflower Home, the fictionalized version of McLean Hospital, one of the leading mental health hospitals in the United States. And it is there, at Mayflower Home that Block depicts in prose, a dismal portrait of a 1960s mental health hospital that is as bleak as the refuse and disease-laden lanes of Limerick, Ireland portrayed so vividly by Frank McCourt in his memoir "Angela's Ashes".

Block traverses easily between the realms of fact and fiction as he spins a captivating, quite engrossing, tale that is based loosely on the real lives of his maternal grandparents, Frederick and Katharine Merrill, his mother and her sisters. His characters are richly drawn and credible, and they include not only his grandparents, but especially those at the Mayflower Home; Schultz, a Harvard professor who hears the voices of his dead relatives, victims of the Nazi Holocaust, who live on in his poignant, often all too painful, memories, Robert Lowell, a poet (a fictionalized version of the real Robert Lowell, whose poetry is cited several times), Marvin Foulds, severely afflicted with multiple personality disorder, and Albert Canon, a Harvard psychiatrist whose cruel stewardship of Mayflower House leads to Frederick's electroshock therapy "punishment" and the suicides of several inmates. And yet, as memorable as these characters are, the one who holds our greatest attention is Katharine herself, an unlikely heroine struggling to keep her family intact as her husband descends into madness.

Block has written a most moving testament on the love affair between Frederick and Katharine, and of a marriage that endures despite Frederick's infidelity and insanity. But it is also a personal, quite heartfelt, act of discovery from Block himself, seeking to reclaim a "blank page" in his family's history while transforming it still into a great work of literary fiction destined to linger in the minds of its readers. Though some have regarded "The Storm at the Door" as this generation's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"; it is quite simply, much more; an affirmation of Stefan Merrill Block as one of the greatest American writers of his generation.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Storm at the Door June 22, 2011

By Marsha from Frisco

Format:Hardcover

Stefan Merrill Block's new book, The Storm at the Door, is a must read. As a fan of The Story of Forgetting, I anxiously awaited Block's newest work. I certainly was not disappointed in the result. This beautifully written novel is a poignant blur between fact and fiction of a family in crisis spanning three generations. The characters take readers on a journey of a failing marriage and a wife's attempt to reconcile her love for her husband and the well being of her children. Eventually, she is forced to commit her beloved Frederick to a mental institution filled with famous writers, including Robert Lowell. While the novel is based on the true story of a grandfather Block never knew, the characters inside the mental institution are fictitious accounts of their experiences in treatment.

But the glimpse inside the mental institution is just one aspect of the novel. Block also delves into the lives of his grandparents, both when Frederick lives at home and when he is in the mental hospital. His wife, Katharine, and their four daughters must carry the burden of hurt and shame while trying to appear to live normal lives. Katharine's love for her husband never diminishes and for the rest of her life she struggles to keep her family together while learning to cope with mental illness. At times the gut-wrenching novel is harsh and other times a sweet view of true love through the eyes of the grandmother. Each character is vibrant and real to the reader and Block moves through time flawlessly, alternating the narration between Frederick and Katharine.

The Storm at the Door is beautifully sculpted to place the reader right into the center of the story. Block takes us to places most never see; the reality of those struggling with mental illness and the families that must hold on to each other to survive. In Block's process of piecing together a history of his family, we all have an opportunity to take this emotionally charged journey and can extend this to find meaning in our own lives.

The summer release is perfect timing so that the book can be packed with vacation luggage. This is a must read because every reader will find a connection to the characters; in the end, we will all reflect on our own lives and find meaning in the promise for tomorrow. This book will be part of many book clubs and bookshelves for many years to come. It is a page-turner. I'm so glad I read it and had the opportunity to fall in love with it, like so many other readers will.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary Narrative of Madness and Isolation July 1, 2011

By Mr. August VINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The first fiction book I read based on real incidents was Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD. It was a revolutionary genre. Decades later, we are presented with a brilliant chronicle of the author's grandparents as he integrates his research into a lyrical story of mental illness and love.

Frederick Merrill (note the author's middle name) is the husband of Katharine and father of four daughters. He is usually an exhilarating man with a ferocious intelligence and charming wit. Merrill served during World War II and returns as an anorexic which instantly puzzles his wife. She accepts his volatile personality and behavior often bolstered by liquor. Forward to the next twenty years as Frederick Merrill, who sporadically provides for his family, is a victim of manic passions and dangerous depressions. Bourbon often served as a catalyst for the manic episodes which seems to be a familiar theme in many intellects, such as Hemingway who also suffered from mental illness and alcoholism.

Katharine is a devoted wife, dedicated to making excuses for her husband's outrageous behavior until one night in 1962 when his actions reach a public display of nudity on a highway and he is led away in handcuffs. Katharine's friends and parents convince her to commit him to the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill. The story takes place near Boston and Mayflower becomes the asylum of choice for the famous; one voluntary patient is the poet Robert Lowell.

Merrill's tenure at Mayflower is a depiction of the helplessness of the mentally ill and for that matter, any prisoner. Locked up, deprived of freedom, learning the landscape to avoid solitary or electroshock treatments, is a heartbreaking commentary. Mayflower is represented as an upscale institution with the latest treatments and theories. Miltown (the Xanax or Valium of today) was distributed to reduce outbursts and ultimately alleviate energy. Since Block was not bound by fact, he used his creativity to expose his grandfather's incarceration as a man held against his will. He is at the mercy of doctors who are engulfed with their own egos. Ironically, his father-in-law pays the high fees until he tells his daughter he can no longer afford it. At this point in the story, I expected Merrill to be released as a non-paying patient but he is not.

Katharine suffers from lack of money, an unsympathetic society and a difficult life. She has mixed feelings but her anger is clouded by her constant struggle to survive economically and protect her four daughters from the social stigma of a "crazy" father.

Everyone was a prisoner. Block enlightened the reader about mental illness treatment in the 1960's but he brought the despair to an agonizing roadblock. He puts us inside of Frederick's insane and lucid mind. Entrenched with Merrill's demons and Katharine's isolation and the other inhabitants of Mayflower, Block brilliantly overlaps fact and fiction and left me breathless.