Constance by Patrick McGrath
My rating: 3/5 cats
remember when happy meals at mcdonald’s used to come with a little sack of cookies and a little cup of pop?? and now they come with, like, milk and apples?? am i wrong for wishing things could stay the same?? could stay reliable??
because the two things we are supposed to be able to count on when we read patrick mcgrath are:
gothic sensibilities
the unreliable narrator
and this one has zero of either. where is my cooky?
this “lack” doesn’t make it bad, but i have been schooled, pavlovian-style, to be attuned to certain cues when reading mcgrath. and i dutifully sniffed for them, only to be rebuffed and deflated at every turn. and he had the gall to set up both of my expectations, without actually following through with them:
both sidney and constance are given a voice in this novel, the opportunity to distill their marriage and their responses, from both sides of their situation. so i was expecting to catch one or the other out in the alternating chapters—to figure out which one was going to be my pony and which was going to turn out to be the big fat liar. but, no.
and constance was raised in a crumbling old house with a mother who died young and a father whom she tried to please, but never could. so i was expecting it to “turn” at any moment, to reveal deep dark secrets.
and there definitely are, but they are less sinister than his previous books. and i know someone is going to read this and comment that part of the secret is, indeed, very sinister, but i am resolute. it’s bad, yes. it is not something i would advocate, but its treatment here is not as spookytime evil as i was expecting. this is no spider.
it is more of a psychological novel, about two damaged characters who try to remake themselves through marriage; through attempting to re-cast their partner in a role for which they are unsuited. constance is trying to find a new daddy, and sidney is trying to wash off the taint of two failed marriages and “fix” the closed-off constance from her childhood neglect and responsibility.
this is, i guess, a more mature patrick mcgrath. a more tender story, raw and emotional, with none of the yanking away of the rug from underfoot. there is some rug-rumpling, yes, but no great yank.
and it’s fine, and if this is your first dance with mcgrath, you will probably like it more than i did.
but i have read 6 of his 8 novels, and expectations are powerful things, indeed…
it opens, promisingly, with an epigraph from sylvia plath, from the only poem of hers i really like:
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you,
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
and it leads from there.
it takes place in manhattan when penn station was just starting to be torn down, so somewhere between 1963-5. this serves as a backdrop for the story of constance and her husband sidney. constance takes comfort in the destruction of the past
…I got a kind of satisfaction from seeing a whole section of the city disappearing as though it had been H-bombed…They were turning it into a ruin. I liked ruins. I’d grown up in one, of course. Sweep away the old stuff, this was my feeling. Start over! Build it new!
while sidney calls it “a staggering act of vandalism”
Forgive me. I feel about architecture as I do about marriage. What was done to Penn Station was wanton. I hate to see a thing destroyed before its time.
and you can see right there that this difference of opinion w/r/t architecture is indicative of these two strong personalities and their inability to be who the other wants them to be.
it is about a woman who is hiding out in her own marriage – lonely and pale in the shadow of her sister; a sloppy drunken…romantic. or, in the book’s description, a messy beatnik floozie.
She possessed what he called a robust personality. He said she had messy vitality. He meant she was loud and had appetites, and by this he meant she’s acquired a taste for liquor, also for men. She attracted older men and didn’t care if they were married or not. This I knew because when installed in some cellar bar in Greenwich Village, where she really felt at home, over copious cocktails she liked nothing better than to tell me about her sex life.
constance at once envies and pities her sister. constance also has a strong personality, but hers is more brittle, more bitter, and her damage has caused her to have not only daddy and sexual issues, but guilt and obsession and the shadow-notes of hysteria and hallucinations and paranoia.
and sidney wants to fix her like a project.
I was patient. I was careful. She came to depend on me. Time spent with me was nourishing, and it was the kind of nourishment she required… I offered water, in effect, to a child dying of thirst, although she didn’t see it that way at the time.
which could, i suppose, be the foundation for a successful marriage, if every couple lived in a vacuum and nothing ever changed. but in this marriage, it is going to cause problems. things will not run smoothly, and there might be a thrown plate or two.
so, overall, it is not my favorite mcgrath, but if i had myself read it in a vacuum, without knowing who had written it, i think i would have been more receptive to its charms.
you be the judge.
read my book reviews on goodreads