McGrath's book is full of an impending sense of doom, says Reena Amos Dyes
Constance
Author: Patrick McGrath
Publisher: Bloomsbury, Rs 499
Disjointed, dispassionate with stilted dialogue are the words that come to mind when thinking about Constance, Patrick McGrath’s eighth offering to the literary world. For someone who has often been said to have an affinity to masters of suspense like Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock, and whose previous books, Spider, Asylum, The Grotesque and The lost Explorer have been made into movies, this is a surprisingly uninspiring novel, even though it carries all his favourite subjects like mental illness and adulterous relationships.
The story revolves around the highly-disturbed Constance Schuyler, an editor at a publishing house in New York, her bohemian sister Iris, their domineering father and Constance’s unfortunate, ever-suffering husband Sidney Klein — a brilliant, English professor 20 years her senior who woos and marries the neurotic Constance in a hurry and repents at leisure.When Sidney sees Constance at a party, standing alone and aloof, he is struck by her beauty and attracted to her “angry untouchability”. Pretty early in the ensuing courtship, Constance tells Sidney that her mother died in very mysterious circumstances and she has a difficult relationship with her doctor-father because he loves her sister Iris more and is distant and cold with her, Constance.
Even though Sidney realises pretty early in the relationship that all is not well with this enigmatic woman, he decides to marry her as he feels very protective towards her. However, Constance, who is emotionally and psychologically vulnerable and has an overwhelming feeling of being worthless thanks to her disapproving father, feels trapped and unhappy in her marriage. She feels that she does not deserve this and it’s not real and resists all of Sidney’s attempts to make her feel loved and secure.
After they first have intercourse, Constance murmurs that she “didn’t know what love was but it occurred to her that this might be it”. On the other hand, there is Iris who is exactly the opposite of her frigid sister Constance and not afraid to experience life to the full. Iris is a beautiful, bohemian girl who Constance cattily accuses of “being not withholding with the cleavage”.
The impulsive Iris throws herself wholeheartedly into an illicit love affair with a seedy looking, unscrupulous, married pianist at a run-down hotel’s bar in New York, where the whole drama takes place and which incidentally is also the domicile of the author. When Iris introduces Constance to this “lush”, the prim Constance is so repulsed by him that she persuades him to break off his affair with Iris who, of course, is left devastated by this desertion by the love of her life. The fact that both sisters are so messed up can squarely be blamed on their uneasy relationship with their father.
Even though Sidney realises that it is her damaging, deprived relationship with her father that lies at the bottom of her “tricky psyche”, and tries his best to give Constance the love,attention and reassurance that she craves for, he fails miserably. Things take a turn for the worse when, during a ‘reconciliatory’ visit to her childhood home Ravenswood, Constance’s father reveals a devastating family secret to her and it is to the “lush” that she turns to for comfort, much to Sidney’s chargin. Unable to handle the harsh reality of her father’s revelation, Constance comes dangerously close to losing her mental equilibrium and descends into sexual depravity and promptly has an affair with her sister’s ex-lover as Iris discovers to her sorrow!
Except for a few moving instances in this twisted love story, the rest of the story leaves you more or less untouched and wondering about the lack of feeling in the stilted, noir prose. What is, however, interesting is the way the author has treated the prose, wherein he switches between first-person accounts from Constance and Sidney.
As usual, the author breaks from tradition and does not employ rotating narrators like most writers are wont to do. He allows one character to narrate events for a few chapters at a stretch before allowing us to see the same situation through the eyes of the other, thereby giving us an interesting insight into the minds of the two protagonists who view the same situation in vastly different ways. This method not only accentuates the vast differences in their personalities, it also keeps the reader wondering who dominates this eccentric love story, which is all about the social and sexual balance in a highly tempestuous relationship that threatens to blast itself into oblivion, if it were not for Howard, Sidney’s little son from an earlier marriage. Strangely, Howard becomes the glue that holds this marriage together as he brings out the mother in Constance who sees a reflection of herself in the child.
McGrath’s Gothic fiction is full of an impending sense of doom as the author is a past master in building an ominous atmosphere. Sidney alludes to something Constance would say “much later, when we were deep in crisis and the joking was over”. Even at their wedding, Sidney feels a “whisper of anxiety”.
So, all in all, it’s not unputdownable and not a novel one would return to again and again, unless one is unduly fond of Gothic fiction and noir prose.