E-book
Asylum
Record details
- ISBN: 9780307764447 (electronic bk.)
- ISBN: 0307764443 (electronic bk.)
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Physical Description:
electronic resource
remote
1 online resource (213 p.) - Publisher: New York : Vintage Books, 1998, c1997.
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| Genre: | EBOOK. Psychological fiction. Electronic books. |
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Electronic resources
- BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 1997 April
With his new novel Asylum, Patrick McGrath, author of the acclaimed novel The Grotesque, ushers the reader into a world steeped in darkness and shadow. Stella Raphael may be a beautiful woman, but she is a tortured soul. Her husband Max, an unimaginative and solemn forensic psychiatrist, has uprooted his family and assumed a post at a maximum-security mental hospital in rural England. Stella, accustomed to London society, quickly becomes listless and bored with her surroundings and her life. She begins to abandon all of the roles expected of her-including the role of attentive mother and dutiful wife. The pace of the novel, and that of Stella's life, accelerates dramatically with the introduction of Edgar Stark, an inmate who is both a brilliant sculpture and convicted murderer. The two meet when Edgar comes to restore the conservatory in the Raphael's garden, and the attraction between them is immediate, electric, and all-consuming. Their obsessive affair leads Stella to break all of her past allegiances, to her family and to society, and what ensues is nothing short of tragedy. McGrath's prose is written with the restraint that only an Englishman could muster. To tell a story of such passion with language so tempered and precise heightens the tension in this already disturbing novel. And the strong presence of the narrator-who is Edgar's psychiatrist, Max's colleague, and Stella's confidante-further enhances this tension. In a manner reminiscent of the best of Nabakov's narrators, McGrath's narrator constitues a powerful, voyeuristic, and potentially manipulative, force in the novel. The bleak psychological and physical landscape, and McGrath's chillingly analytical, scientific prose lend an eerieness to Asylum that elevates it from a mere thriller to flawless expression of the Arabesque.Reviewed by Katherine Harrison. Copyright 1998 BookPage Reviews - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1996 December
~ A contemporary master of highbrow gothic fiction, McGrath (Dr. Haggard's Disease, 1993, etc.) sticks to worldly psychopathology in his icy new novel. At the center of this study in ``morbid obsessional sexual compulsion'' is Stella Raphael, a British woman of extraordinary beauty married to a dull, unimaginative, cold forensic psychiatrist. Which makes life hard for the passionate Stella, who soon finds herself infatuated with one of the inmates at the maximum security institution where her husband works. Edgar Stark, a sculptor with a distinct ``animal vitality,'' suffers from ``morbid delusions.'' Insane jealousy inspired by these delusions led him to bludgeon his wife to death. A trusty at the hospital, Edgar works on the grounds of Stella's house, where their daily chats soon escalate into sweaty ruttings in the gazebo. After Edgar escapes, Stella follows him, but life underground with Edgar in London quickly becomes hard and shabby, and Stella misses her ten- year-old son. When Edgar's explosive jealousy emerges once again, Stella goes home. Her husband loses his job, and the family is forced into exile in Wales. In deep depression, Stella engages in meaningless sex with her landlord, drinks herself into a stupor, and watches, helpless, as her son drowns on a school outing. Found to be negligent, judged to be mad, she winds up in the very institution where her husband used to work, and where Stark is now an inmate again. But the real twist to this otherwise melodramatic tale is the narrator, himself a staff psychiatrist who treats both Stella and Edgar, and who also has designs on Stella--yet another man trying to possess this free spirit. The unreliability of the narrator, the intense psychological layerings of the narrative, and the fevered interpretations of events by McGrath's characters make for a truly complex (but never obscure) novel. McGrath, always a worthy descendant of Poe, here takes things a level higher--producing fiction in the tradition of Henry James. (First printing of 75,000; author tour) Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1996 October
In McGrath's latest, which Random hopes will be his breakout book, the bored but gorgeous wife of a boring but successful psychiatrist launches a devastating affair with a sculptor who murdered his wife. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 1996 December #3
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. 75,000 first printing; paperback rights to Vintage; rights sold in the U.K. and six European nations; author tour. (Feb.)
