{"id":821,"date":"2011-07-01T23:06:23","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T17:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/?p=821"},"modified":"2011-07-01T23:06:23","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T17:06:23","slug":"review-of-stefan-merrill-blocks-the-storm-at-the-door","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/07\/01\/review-of-stefan-merrill-blocks-the-storm-at-the-door\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Stefan Merrill Block's "The Storm at the Door""},"content":{"rendered":"

My review of Stefan Merrill Block’s novel The Storm at the Door<\/em> appeared in the Dallas Morning News last Sunday, and can be found at this url:
\nhttp:\/\/www.dallasnews.com\/entertainment\/books\/20110624-book-review-the-storm-at-the-door-by-stefan-merrill-block.ece
\nIt’s an earnest novel about his grandparents’ lives, and at times I felt it suffered from his belief that his grandfather’s story (who was in a psychiatric facility in 1962, for exposing himself while drunk\u2014in 2011 the clinic might have just been a rehab facility) was more important than it is, at least to me. There’s an evil psychiatrist who seemed like the wicked Dr. Chilton in The Silence of the Lambs<\/em>, the second reference to that film\/novel I’ve noticed this month.
\nHere’s the text version:
\nTHE STORM AT THE DOOR\/By Stefan Merrill Block
\nRandom House; 368 pages, $25
\nThe Madness in Families
\nRaised in Plano, author Stefan Merrill Block\u2019s, \u201cThe Story of Forgetting,\u201d was a critically acclaimed debut novel about the anguish of Alzheimer\u2019s. His second novel, \u201cThe Storm at the Door,\u201d is another in the recent trend of \u201cfictional memoirs,\u201d fiction based on actual events, in the vein of Jeanette Walls\u2019 \u201cHalf-Broke Horses,\u201d though much grimmer and inward-focused. It concerns the tortuous life story of Block\u2019s grandparents\u2014his grandfather, Frederick Merrill, emotionally disturbed and alcoholic, and his grandmother, Katharine, the long-suffering woman who eventually had enough.
\nMost of the story unfolds at the \u201cfictional\u201d Mayflower clinic, a psychiatric care facility near Boston, patterned after the famous McLean Hospital, in which Block\u2019s grandfather was a patient in 1962. This mixing of fact\/fiction is hit and miss. Frederick\u2019s life is tragic in a familiar way: he drinks too much, seduces women while living as a (badly) married man, and indulges in various sins that family members might forgive and others simply dismiss as boorish behavior. He\u2019s admitted into psychiatric care for indecent exposure, which he tries to portray as a \u201cjoke,\u201d an alibi that many no doubt wish would get them off the hook.
\nAt the Mayflower clinic, a villain emerges in the guise of Albert Canon, chief psychiatrist, who more closely resembles the despicable, self-centered Dr. Frederick Chilton in \u201cThe Silence of the Lambs\u201d (1991). Canon\u2019s sins are also familiar\u2014punishing patients with electroshock therapy or solitary confinement, taking away their writing materials, picking on their emotional weaknesses. Guilty of his own bad behavior in an affair with one of assistants, Rita, Canon has no redeemable qualities, and at times seems a caricature of a quack academic psychiatrist. One scene in particular recalls Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey\u2019s classic \u201cOne Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest,\u201d which is an awkward comparison, in that \u201cCuckoo\u2019s Nest\u201d is a much more daring novel, with literary inventiveness, anguish, humor, and ultimately hope, while Block\u2019s novel is somber and claustrophobic.
\nThe other patients at Mayflower are a mixture of the famous and the bizarre: as is pointed out several times, Mayflower is a reputable institution, counting the poet Robert Lowell and the mathematician John Nash as patients, but in this novel, the most important characters besides Frederick and Canon are Marion Foulds, a multiple-personality disorder sufferer, and Professor Schultz, a broken academic, who both commit suicide.
\nThe life story of Katharine Merrill, Frederick\u2019s wife, is a sad shadow to his own. She suffers his bad behavior for years, accepts him home from the clinic and attempts to carry on, ultimately to end her life in a manner oddly similar to her broken husband. The climactic moment in her life\u2014through the eyes of her young grandson, at least\u2014occurs when she burns the writings her husband composed while at Mayflower. It\u2019s an act born of bitterness, resignation, and a desire to be loose from the past. Ultimately \u201cThe Storm at the Door\u201d is itself a reckoning with the past, an attempt to make sense of familial mysteries\u2014lyrical, touching and heartfelt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My review of Stefan Merrill Block’s novel The Storm at the Door appeared in the Dallas Morning News last Sunday, and can be found at this url: http:\/\/www.dallasnews.com\/entertainment\/books\/20110624-book-review-the-storm-at-the-door-by-stefan-merrill-block.ece It’s an earnest novel about his grandparents’ lives, and at times I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}