Recent Reviews
the other side of you by Salley Vickers
Salley Vickers 2006 novel The Other Side of You explores the many dimensions of love and loss and celebrates the healing power of being heard and understood. After the love of her life dies, Elizabeth Cruikshank, a divorced mother of two, attempts suicide and lands in a mental hospital. She becomes the patient of David McBride, a psychiatrist who is haunted by an older brother who died when David was five years old.
Cruikshank initially sits in silence and will not speak to McBride. Yet in one magical moment brought on by a shared admiration of the artist, Caravaggio, a sense of safety wafts into the room. Elizabeth tells the tragic story of how she found true love, how she doubted the love, and how she lost it. As Elizabeth talks and McBride listens for seven hours, Elizabeth understands more about her relationship with Thomas Gallagher and the ways and reasons she sabotaged her own happiness. Vickers, a psychologist, seems to be lifting up the healing powers of listening and understanding another person without judgment and opprobrium. As David McBride states, “We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.”
In listening to Elizabeth Cruikshank’s heartbreaking tale, David McBride realizes something about his own life. Every choice he has made connects to the guilt he feels over the death of his brother. "I had lived with this invisible gash in my side, this breach in my dyke, this crumbling portion of my sea wall.”
Vickers seems to believe that people carry within them shame and embarrassment for choices they have made or things that they have done and so they hide their most authentic selves from themselves and others. McBride states, “It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is that we would rather be crippled by what we lack than risk the pain that is one potential consequence of placing our secret selves in others’ hands.” And yet, paradoxically, he also says, “I believe that we are in anguish until someone finally finds us out.”
Though I found the characters distant, I applaud Vickers attempt to write a novel rich with history and ideas. The Other Side of You includes the poetry of TS Elliot, the art of Caravaggio, parables from the Bible, a positive representation of a therapeutic relationship, and the encouraging premise that people can be healed.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
In honor of Kazou Ishiguro’s recent Nobel Award for Literature, I reread for the third time his most famous novel, The Remains of The Day. This book never ceases to amaze me, as the novel requires the reader to understand all that is said, but more importantly all that is unsaid. It speaks to England’s role in WWII and the resulting change in the social structure. Ishiguro’s restraint, elegance, and skills as a writer are stunning. The story is told in the first person by James Stevens, the head butler on an English estate named Darlington Hall. He undertakes his job, like his father before him, with solemnity and seriousness as if he is a member of the British military serving his country.
When the novel opens in 1956, eleven years after the end of WWII, Stevens is preparing to travel from Darlington Hall to a small town a few hours away. The journey wakes him to the sad possibility that he might have made a miscalculation in his obedience and incuriosity toward his boss who supported the enemy during the war. “You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him; I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes.”
And yet Stevens doesn’t linger on his possible miscalculation. He possesses a professional pride such that even when his father lies dying upstairs, Stevens carries out his responsibilities rather than remaining with his dad. And when Lord Darlington demands that Stevens fire two Jewish housekeepers and his colleague Miss Kenton objects, Steven responds, “Surely, I don’t have to remind you that our professional duty is not to our foibles and sentiments, but to the wishes of our employer.”
Stevens intends to visit Miss Kenton, the former head housekeeper at Darlington Hall with whom he worked for many years. While Miss Kenton’s love for Mr. Stevens seems apparent, Mr. Stevens’ is unable to access his feelings about Miss Kenton. Stevens embarks on this pilgrimage, not to untangle his feelings toward her. Rather he psychologically projects his perspective about his life onto her, “All in all, I cannot see why the option of her returning to Darlington Hall and seeing out her working years there should not offer a very genuine consolation to a life that has come to be so dominated by a sense of waste.”
Stevens so embodies his role that he doesn’t know what he thinks or feels, even while he unconsciously fears those feelings. In working to contain his responses, his access to his emotions becomes like a stuck door unable to open. He says, “After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”
Will Stevens change his life after these small epiphanies of introspection? Not likely. Underneath his professional persona, the reader can see melancholy and pain and a surge of defensiveness. And though Stevens' perspective softens on his journey, I suspect he will fortify his façade for the remainder of his days.
Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett
I can’t say that Imagi e Me Go e by Adam Haslett is an enjoyable read. It is not. And there are certain aspects I wish he wrote differently. However, his novel provides an important contribution to the understanding of mental illness. He doesn’t criticize or complement his characters. He simply gives empathic and eloquent voices to one family’s pain and suffering as they cope with an illness that is not understood or curable.
The novel follows the slow devolution of a family wrestling with the effects of mental illness on two family members. Both parents - John and Margaret - and the three kids - Michael, Celia, and Alec - take turns narrating the story, which adds to the story’s impressiveness. When Margaret and John are young, engaged, and living in England, John lands in a mental hospital. Though the psychiatrist warns Margaret about John’s clinical depression, she does not hesitate to marry him. She loves him. They move to the United States and begin their life together and John’s mental state stabilizes.
Soon after their move, Margaret and John have children, their finances are strained, and sometimes John cannot get up off the couch. Margaret carries the weight of the family responsibilities. The three kids suffer as they witness their parents’ frequent fights and their father’s mental diminishment. When John falls into a deep depression, his family tries to reach him, but their efforts are futile.
When Michael, the eldest son, takes over as narrator, it becomes clear that there is something quite different about him. No question he is intellectually gifted, but there is a neediness, incoherence, and manic element to his narration. Michael’s mother and siblings remain loyal and steadfast. Margaret understands her son and yet she cannot save him from himself. Margaret remembers Michael being different from the day of his birth.
Michael’s family and a few close friends understand his misfiring mind. Their loyalty and devotion to Michael, given his difficult personality, is impressive. His obsession with slavery and oppression exhausts those around him. Michael moves from rabbit hole to rabbit hole, desperate but unsuccessful in establishing relationships. Michael says, “People don’t want to be loved the way I love them. They get suffocated. It isn’t their fault. But it isn’t mine either.”
Michael’s family is willing to do most anything for him. And yet Michael’s mental illness penetrates their emotional and financial lives. Michael’s siblings, Celia and Alec, counsel him, comfort him, and try to provide him the hope he needs to keep living. Even as Celia and Alec live their own lives, Michael’s mental state haunts the entire family as they all struggle and suffer.
Chosen as a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award Long List, Adam Haslett's book successfully tackles this difficult subject with compassion and insight. This is not a book about dysfunctional family dynamics. This is a book about illness: mental illness and its debilitating effects on the afflicted and those who support and love them.
