Trauma (Hardcover)

by Patrick McGrath (Author)
Key Phrases: psych unit, Fulton Street, Joan Bachinski, Sam Pike (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.)
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Review
"The inversion of roles, the blurring of the boundaries between the rational and the irrational, the violence, the twisted sexual passions, the slipperiness of memory: these are familiar themes in McGrath's fiction. Here they are recombined in powerful and imaginative ways. Trauma is a gripping psychological thriller. McGrath's prose is taut and lean; his way with characters is deft; and his explorations of the dark side of human nature are disturbing. And at the novel's centre, the descent of its narrator from a false sense of superiority into a pit of madness and despair is handled with great skill." –Andrew Scull, The Times Literary Supplement

“Full of sensitive, well-observed touches [and] elegant when it needs to be…In Trauma, McGrath makes us see that our own minds are the most haunted of houses.” –Stephanie Zacharek, Los Angeles Times

“That hypnotic, reasonable and wistful voice of Dr. Charles Weir, psychiatrist, had me utterly in thrall…Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair…[It] is, in short, a terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge, worried and guessing.” –Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“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... --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140004166X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400041664
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #282,207 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Mcgrath chiller, April 9, 2008

By	Christopher Enzi (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "I'm running on empty here.", April 6, 2008

By	E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "It is always happening now, for the first time.", April 12, 2008

By	Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.