From Publishers Weekly
McGrath (
Port Mungo) manipulates reader expectations expertly in this sharp-edged psychological study of a man deluded by his personal demons. Charlie Weir, a Manhattan psychiatrist, applies the life skills the members of his badly dysfunctional family have helped him hone to counseling patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. While everyone else he knows appears in danger of spinning out of orbit, Charlie exudes the calmness and confidence of a man in control of his circumstances. But he's unable to connect emotionally with the women in his life, and he repeatedly revisits his memory of the suicide of his ex-wife's brother, who was also one of his patients. With painstaking precision, McGrath drives this story to a climactic, if hastily resolved, moment of self-revelation in which Charlie uncovers a forgotten personal trauma that has perverted his perceptions and made him the most unreliable of narrators. Notwithstanding these efforts to give Charlie's tale the jolt of a psychological thriller, this is a haunting story of a man in the grip of a painful and beautifully articulated spiritual malaise.
(Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Tortuous, often gripping…The novel is aptly titled, since trauma can be said to be the origin and the end of its insidiously uncoiling developments.” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review
“
Trauma is Patrick McGrath at his dark-hearted best. Read one page–one sentence–and you’ll be hooked by this elegant psychological thriller set in the gritty, pre-gentrification Manhattan of the 1970s…
Trauma reminds you of how satisfying it is to be unable to put a book down–and then, when it’s over, to be sorry and relieved to enter your own comparatively unhaunted life.” —Francine Prose,
O, The Oprah Magazine
“A haunting story of a man in the grip of a painful and beautifully articulated spiritual malaise.” —
Publishers Weekly
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