Constance: A Novel

The cool, beautiful Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan in the early 1960s. At a literary party, she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Sidney is a single father with a poor marital record, and he pursues Constance with relentless determination. Eventually she surrenders, accepts his marriage proposal, and moves, with some dread, into his dark, book-filled apartment. She can't settle in. She's tortured by memories of the bitterly unhappy childhood she spent with her father in a dilapidated house upstate. When she learns devastating new information about that past, Constance's fragile psyche suffers a profound shock. Her marriage, already tottering, threatens to collapse completely. Frightened, desperate and alone, Constance makes a disastrous decision, then looks on as her world rapidly falls apart. Her only consolation, as the city swelters in an interminable heat wave, is the friendship of Sidney's son Howard, a strange, delicate child, not unlike Constance herself. The story of a marriage in crisis and a family haunted by trauma, Constance is also a tale of resilience and loyalty, and of the moral inspiration that can lead even the most lost of souls back to the light.

About the Author :
Patrick McGrath is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Asylum, Martha Peake, Port Mungo, Trauma, and Spider, adapted into a 2002 David Cronenberg film. Born in London, McGrath lives in New York.

Review :
Patrick McGrath can write a love story like no other man alive-- dark, a little twisted, very passionate... loaded with exact and unexpected sensuous detail. One of those rare pleasures, a book as absorbing as it is intelligent--a book so rewarding to read that I found myself spacing out chapters, restraining my curiosity to savor the elegant sentences. This is a thrilling book to read if only for its plot. Every page is full of portent, of mystery, of the suggestion of the disasters that are about to occur. But there is an even greater thrill: the thrill of insight. With great sympathy and wisdom, he explores those obscure regions of the psyche where love and evil mingle, where tragedy has its roots. Taut, tension-filled... a chilling story that works as both a Freudian parable and an old-fashioned gothic shocker. Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma [is] either a superb psychological thriller or a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair... A terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge. A masterpiece -- fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore. Best-selling author McGrath expertly explores and exploits the dark motives and sinister forces surrounding his characters, who are set adrift in a world they cannot comprehend. Working on multiple levels, the novel offers meaningful commentary while combining the sensibilities of Tennessee Williams and an old noir film to create something even more atmospheric, just for the fun of it