Customer Reviews

Trauma (Vintage Contemporaries)

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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.

If you're hoping for a soul-baring by one of McGrath's fascinatingly damaged narrators, think twice before buying Trauma. As a fan of Dr. Haggard's Disease, Spider, and Asylum, I looked forward to more of the same sort of psychological study in Trauma. It actually belongs to a different genre from McGrath's other books -- not modern gothic (though there is a brief nod in that direction at the end), but a more mainstream exploration of an American psychiatrist struggling to live and work under the burden of a repressed childhood trauma. As the story progresses we're given clues to the nature of the damage, but when the moment of revelation came I found myself only mildly interested. Though Trauma is well plotted and written (I doubt McGrath could do less if he tried), it seemed to me that its author, too, was only mildly interested. Mistakes in the text (e.g., confusion between "lie" and "lay", & between saints Stephen and Sebastian) strengthen the impression that both writer and editor gave less attention to Trauma than they might have done. I'll always be a McGrath devotee, but this particular book fails to grip.

Trauma is an intense book. It thoroughly grips you and refuses to loosen up on it's hold, long after you complete the book. The book is only 210 pages in length, but the pages are written so well that it is impossible to feel cheated. I don't want to give away plot details, so I'll just end by saying that everyone should read this book. It is well worth your time and money.

I am a psychologist who loves novels delving into the psyche of those who explore behaviors and psyches. This book was similar to that of Perlmans (7 types of Ambiguity) where you realize that the business of being human supercedes all of our professional roles. The helper is often driven by a sense of helplessness, and the human heart can never be quenched. Also, a good portrait of PTSD, although I don't treat vetrans, this book seems to nail its clinical course on the head.

I picked up Patrick McGrath's latest book because I'd read and enjoyed "Spider", but this book is not nearly as interesting. The prose, while mostly quite beautiful, is also so dark, so dull. It's a good thing it's not a very long book at 200 or so pages. I believe Mr. McGrath should have given us a few hints about the ending of this book, even though it was quite predictable. It just would have been a more entertaining book had he dropped a few crumbs along the way. I also had a problem with the editing of this book. Was the heavy prose that hard to slog through that at least one glaring mistake could be over looked? On page 27 these words are written: "She turned toward me......propped her head on her chin to gaze at me." Huh? Propped her head on her chin? I know what McGrath meant, but come on, that's just wrong. I like complicated, psychiatric plots, so I will probably read Mr. McGrath again......but not too soon.

Patrick McGrath's talents at mining the human psyche are exquisite. In each of his works he has the ability to deftly peel back the mysterious layers of his characters, exposing them to the reader in much the same way he would peel an onion. Their fears, their flaws, their hopes, their dysfunctions are all brought to light and laid bare in a way that many authors cannot do with similar success. With TRAUMA, McGrath's newest psychological thriller, those honed skills continue to work wonders.

TRAUMA is told through Charlie Weir. He is a successful psychologist and that's about it, doing his best to aid psychologically afflicted Vietnam War veterans in late-1970s New York City. His marriage has failed, he's a weekend father, he visits prostitutes to sate his needs, he loathes his artist brother, Walt, he outright hates his vagabond father and he dotes on a mother who only has love for his sibling. Charlie is a lonely man in a city of millions, crushed by his inability to save his wife's brother. Everything about his life is on a downward slide, and he reaches rock bottom when his mother dies.

That event sparks a new path for Charlie. His former wife, Agnes, comes back into his life, embracing him at the expense of her current marriage. At the same time, however, a new woman catches Charlie's fancy. She has an explosive anger and horrific nightmares that Charlie believes are flashes of buried childhood trauma --- a trauma that threatens to destroy their tenuous relationship before it really starts.

Even then, as Charlie tries to fix others, the very fabric of his own deeply buried secret begins to unfold, and a family trauma from his childhood long passed off as a dream becomes a hauntingly real revelation that could undo him completely.

Throughout TRAUMA there is the unnerving feeling of resting precariously on an abyss over which Charlie, or even his daily companions, can slip and plummet at any moment. McGrath does such a phenomenal job at keeping heightened tension without doing so overtly. It is almost a natural element of his writing, and the near panic is woven into each passage.

Amazingly, while each person is supremely flawed and has those flaws openly exposed, they all are people who draw interest and concern from the reader. Even as they may do things considered unacceptable, they often redeem themselves throughout the natural course of their lives. Each of these characters seems a real, living entity that any of us could encounter on any given day. It is this definition and completeness of character that makes TRAUMA work.

If there was one place where the book didn't pay off, it would be with its ending. The patience in telling the story up until the last two chapters was cast aside, making the reveal and resolution a frenetic and hurried moment crammed onto a handful of pages. Even with this failing, however, TRAUMA is still a wondrously strong title from a gifted writer who should be getting far more attention.

if you have read McGrath's "Asylum" this one is pretty thin beer.
Elegantly written, as always, but the emotional tension seems more manufactured than in his earlier books.
I didn't buy into the final revelation of Wier's own childhood trauma at all. Why didn't the brother tell him all those years?
Disappointing.

I immediately was drawn into this book. It's characters were well drawn, the plot although going back and forth in time was compelling and I didn't see the end coming. Charlie is almost heart-breaking, as he suffers through relationships in spite of being a psychiatrist trained in helping others through their problems.
An excellent novel!