Mental Illness in the Family

Ask Again, Yes     Mary Beth Keane     (2019)

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope meet in the police academy in New York City in the early 1970s. After they each marry, they end up buying adjoining houses in a leafy suburb, commuting to the city to pursue their cop careers. This could become a pretty idyllic tale, especially when Kate, one of Francis’s three daughters, forms a deep childhood friendship with Peter, Brian’s only child. But mental illness is no respecter of happy endings.

We know from the start that Brian’s wife, Anne, is unconventional and taciturn, and Brian “always seemed to want to defuse things by agreeing with her.” (73) After Anne loses a baby, her mental state becomes dangerously explosive. (A word of warning that Anne’s turn to violence results in a distressing scene, though it’s very brief.) Anne’s actions have long-term consequences for both families: the teenage Kate and Peter are torn apart, and adult careers are shattered.

The novelist gives her story a long arc of many decades and handles it with sensitivity. Anne is not cast as a villain but rather as a suffering soul whose mental illness needs treatment, not contempt. Her actions are hurtful to others, physically and emotionally, but these actions don’t arise out of malice.

Despite the difficult subject matter, the tone of the novel is steady and even, probing family interactions with subtlety, holding the attachment of Kate and Peter as a spark of hope.

What about that title? The phrase “Ask again, yes” is plucked from an exchange, late in the book, between Kate and Peter, and it hints, from the time that you first see the cover, that they may eventually be reunited. Other than that, I didn’t find the title particularly illuminating. Still, my need to learn how life turned out for the members of the Gleeson and Stanhope families kept me moving from chapter to chapter in this immersive, well-wrought novel.

Quiet Conflict

Upstate     James Wood     (2018)

The British-born writer James Wood, transplanted to the United States, has produced a novel about a British businessman visiting his adult daughter in upstate New York. Commentary on the differences between the two countries is inevitable. Here are a couple of the observations of the character Alan Querry:  

• “He did sincerely love—and rate as one of the great American contributions—the phrase ‘Take it easy.’ . . .That benign blessing wouldn’t catch on in Britain, where the pavements were sopped with cold rainwater and everyone seemed to have attended queuing school, to learn how to do it with the requisite degree of resigned submission.” (27)

• “America was peculiar, more foreign than he had expected, it sharpened his senses. What a contradictory place: for every limitation, there was an expansion, for every frustration, an easement. The train was absurd, trundling along at barely sixty miles an hour. And Penn Station was a bloody embarrassment to a great capital city. To a great city, rather.” (51)

These are the contexts of the novel, which revolves quietly around family conflict. Alan’s 2007 trip to Saratoga Springs, New York, arises from his concern over the mental health of his daughter Vanessa, who teaches philosophy at Skidmore College. Traveling with Alan is his other daughter, Helen, a harried and hurried music executive with Sony in London. The fourth main character is Josh, Vanessa’s boyfriend, who has alerted Vanessa’s father and sister to a potentially serious bout of depression that Vanessa seems to be suffering. Although the stated issue is Vanessa’s health, Helen isn’t in great shape either, with a rocky marriage, twin sons whom she has little time for, and an urge to leave Sony and start her own company.

This is a novel to be savored for its simplicity and its glimpses into the minds of people sincerely endeavoring to help each other, though with approaches determined by the personality of each. Alan, for example, is a real estate developer who is “not in the top tier, probably not even in the second or third tier” (119) of developers in his region because he’s not cutthroat enough. Vanessa views her father and sister as “proud, impulsive people who considered themselves largely modest and rational.  . . .Vanessa hated confrontation—partly because she couldn’t believe that anyone who had strongly argued with her could ever like her again.” (153) The underlying motives of the boyfriend Josh are elusive until the very end of the novel.

The landscapes of upstate New York are richly portrayed in this work that sometimes verges into prose poetry. But don’t expect bedazzlement or sensationalism when you’re going to be served thoughtfulness.

Brazil, Early 1960s

All Is Beauty Now     Sarah Faber     (2017)

Historical facts that I learned from this novel:  After the American Civil War, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Southerners fled to Brazil, where slavery was still legal and where the Brazilian government offered them incentives to settle. These immigrants, called the Confederados, and their descendants lived in enclaves, mostly near Rio de Janeiro and Sấo Paulo. Although there was considerable intermarriage with Brazilians over the decades, Confederados were an identifiable ethnic group in Brazil as late as the 1960s and 1970s.

Dora, a descendant of Confederados, is married to Hugo, a handsome Canadian engineer. They live outside Rio and have three daughters. In the opening pages of All Is Beauty Now, the eldest daughter, Luiza, disappears while swimming in the South Atlantic in March 1962. Canadian novelist Susan Faber slowly unfolds the back story to this disappearance, probing deeply into the psyches of each of the five members of the family. The chapters move forward and backward in time and switch off among characters. It soon becomes apparent that Hugo’s mental illness is a catalyst for many other actions in the plot. Hugo would likely be diagnosed today as having bipolar disorder, but in the early 1960s the term did not exist, nor did effective treatments.

I dipped into All Is Beauty Now over a period of several weeks, soaking up descriptions of the white-sand beaches and lush gardens, the wild riotousness of Carnival, the extravagance of the nightclubs in Rio. Hugo finds that, compared with Canada, “Rio was a demented Eden, crackling with newness and feeling . . . Here, below the equator, as the Brazilians say, there is no sin.” (37)

Beneath the surface issue of Luiza’s presumed drowning, Faber analyzes, perhaps in too much detail, the effect of Hugo’s mental state on his family and on others around him. The question of drug treatment for Hugo is fraught. For example, in a flashback, Luiza asks herself, “What if the doctors stripped away his moods, then found there was nothing left?” (55) As the family prepares to move to Hugo’s native Canada to seek better care for him, Dora muses on the luxury of having servants in Brazil:  “When the Confederados arrived in Brazil, her father told her, they found cockroaches the size of a fist, and mosquitoes carrying dengue, malaria, encephalitis. A third of her ancestors died; a third went home, and accepted Northern rule; a third stayed, thrashed and coaxed the landscape. And now she, their descendant, can do almost nothing for herself, by herself. Some part of her is grateful that Canada will be hard. Perhaps all that labour will wash away the slick sheen of her advantages.” (260)

Faber’s prose ranges from languid to exotic in this melancholic novel. The pacing of this novel is very slow, totally unhurried, like a drowsy day on a magnificent beach. But the ocean can sweep anyone away with cruel rapidity.