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McGrath, Patrick ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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ASYLUM
McGrath, Patrick
1997 46440 The New Yorker review praised Patrick McGrath's "ornate, deadpan style . . . distinguished by its unusual seriousness, its lack of camp," and described Asylum as a "layered, implicating book, whose terrors and malignities aren't quite the ones we expect, and are a matter of mood and viewpoint as well as of plot." McGrath's fourth novel (his other three are also highly recommended) features a subtly deceptive narrator whose confident, musical voice seduces you--a voice that mirrors, in its meter, emotions ranging from lyrically obsessed, to meticulously fond, to cautious and stiff with horror. And the imagery is unforgettable: the grim architecture of the asylum; a ravaged human head with empty eye sockets; a drowning in a pool on a barren heath. From Publishers Weekly McGrath (Dr. Haggard's Disease) has a mind that revels in the toxic side of things. In this tale of headlong descent into darkness and despair, the toxicity comes from obsessional love. Stella Raphael is the lovely but dissatisfied wife of Max, a resident psychiatrist at an asylum for the criminally insane in the countryside near London. She becomes infatuated with Edgar Stark, a sculptor who murdered and mutilated his wife in a delusionary fit, and the two contrive a passionate affair when Edgar is assigned to work in the Raphaels' garden on the asylum grounds. Stealing Max's clothes, Edgar escapes to London and goes underground, where Stella eventually follows him. When he begins to manifest the same furious jealousies that led to his wife's murder, she flees home again, only to find she has ruined her husband's career. The Raphaels, with their young son, Charlie, are exiled to a remote hospital in rural Wales, where further disaster strikes as Stella drifts into her own desperate delusions. The story is told by another psychiatrist at the asylum, ostensibly through interviews with Stella. Although the doctor's own interpolations are sometimes a relief in the supercharged atmosphere, this seems an unnecessary device, and the intended frisson of his participation in the somber conclusion doesn't come off. In every other respect, however, the book is hypnotizing, with its own strange but darkly convincing pace and style; and the way in which nature and climate are woven into the fabric of the bizarre couple's strange love is masterly. Random House 0-679-45228-1 / 9780679452287
Hardcover As New Condition New York
Price:
19.69 USD
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Asylum - A Novel
McGrath, Patrick
02867903 Hard Cover. As New/As New Book Jacket. First Edition. OUT-OF-PRINT. 6 x 9". ISBN:0679452281. REVIEW from Booklist: "If you perceive the shadowy side of the word asylum, the institutional sense that is, you're primed for the mise-en-scene of McGrath's lushly gothic tale. Author of Dr. Haggard's Disease (1993), McGrath explores issues of power, lust, and the ever-shifting definition of sanity in this sensual yet harrowing drama of sexual obsession at a high-security insane asylum just outside London. ... Max is a new, ambitious staff psychiatrist who foolishly focuses all of his energy on work, leaving his beautiful, chic, libidinous wife, Stella, suffocating with boredom. With only her amphibian-loving 10-year-old son for company, she wanders listlessly about the hospital's grounds until she comes under the spell of a patient named Edgar Stark. A magnetic man and a gifted sculptor, Edgar was institutionalized after murdering his wife, a fact that does nothing to cool Stella's abrupt and overwhelming ardor. ..The tragic story of their love affair is related by McGrath's narrator, a seemingly wise and chivalrous colleague of Max's, but, in fact, a man with his own questionable agenda. A virtuoso of contrast, McGrath wields a cleverly modernized form of Victorianism, precise and stately, to render scenes of unsettling and suspenseful eroticism in settings as diverse as the bursting garden where the doomed lovers meet; the bleak, rain-blasted coast of Wales; and the pitiless hallways of the asylum. All is push and pull here, as mad strategies are followed to their dire conclusions, and Stella pays the ultimate price for her desirability and unsatisfied hungers.. Donna Seaman"... 254 pages published at $22.00. Mississauga, ON, Canada: Random House of Canada, Limited, 1997
Price:
15.75 USD
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