Preview Trauma
Charlie Weir is a man who tackles other people's demons for a living. He has seen every kind of trauma during his years as a psychiatrist in New York.Yet he hasn't found a way of resolving his own conflicts, particularly the fatal mistake that caused his wife and daughter to leave him condemning him to corrosive loneliness and restless anger.Years later, he meets a beautiful but damaged woman who promises to restore his dwindling faith in both his profession and himself. But as he realizes that she has become more of a patient than a lover, events conspire to send him reeling toward the abyss. Addictive and enthralling, Trauma is Patrick McGrath's most riveting work to date.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
**
From Publishers WeeklyMcGrath (Port Mungo) manipulates reader expectations expertly in this sharp-edged psychological study of a man deluded by his personal demons. Charlie Weir, a Manhattan psychiatrist, applies the life skills the members of his badly dysfunctional family have helped him hone to counseling patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. While everyone else he knows appears in danger of spinning out of orbit, Charlie exudes the calmness and confidence of a man in control of his circumstances. But he's unable to connect emotionally with the women in his life, and he repeatedly revisits his memory of the suicide of his ex-wife's brother, who was also one of his patients. With painstaking precision, McGrath drives this story to a climactic, if hastily resolved, moment of self-revelation in which Charlie uncovers a forgotten personal trauma that has perverted his perceptions and made him the most unreliable of narrators. Notwithstanding these efforts to give Charlie's tale the jolt of a psychological thriller, this is a haunting story of a man in the grip of a painful and beautifully articulated spiritual malaise. (Apr.)
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