Constance: A Novel - Hardcover

McGrath, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1608199436 ISBN 13: 9781608199433

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2013

Synopsis

The cool, beautiful Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan in the early 1960s. At a literary party, she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Sidney is a single father with a poor marital record, and he pursues Constance with relentless determination. Eventually she surrenders, accepts his marriage proposal, and moves, with some dread, into his dark, book-filled apartment.

She can't settle in. She's tortured by memories of the bitterly unhappy childhood she spent with her father in a dilapidated house upstate. When she learns devastating new information about that past, Constance's fragile psyche suffers a profound shock. Her marriage, already tottering, threatens to collapse completely. Frightened, desperate and alone, Constance makes a disastrous decision, then looks on as her world rapidly falls apart. Her only consolation, as the city swelters in an interminable heat wave, is the friendship of Sidney's son Howard, a strange, delicate child, not unlike Constance herself.

The story of a marriage in crisis and a family haunted by trauma, Constance is also a tale of resilience and loyalty, and of the moral inspiration that can lead even the most lost of souls back to the light.

About this title

About the Author

Patrick McGrath is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Asylum, Martha Peake, Port Mungo, Trauma, and Spider, adapted into a 2002 David Cronenberg film. Born in London, McGrath lives in New York.

From Booklist

McGrath’s (Trauma, 2008) latest elegant and droll gothic novel begins in Manhattan in the early 1960s at the start of a dispiriting slide into decrepitude and chaos. Sidney, a rigorously analytical Englishman and academic, views the “wanton” demolition of the grand old Pennsylvania Station as a particularly egregious travesty, one that is echoed in the ensuing destruction of a family. The disconsolately divorced father of a sensitive little son, Sidney pounces on fragile and aloof Constance, a young editor, at a book party. They quickly marry, joking uneasily about her being the gazelle, he the lion. But predator-prey relationships are not what they seem in this stealthy melodrama about power struggles, repression, and madness enacted primarily at Constance’s childhood home. A drafty, decaying old house on a cliff, Ravenswood faces the Hudson River, which, in all its gray and spangled moods, reflects the doom and mania of Constance’s dire battles with her father and her hard-drinking sister. Ravishing in its troubled eroticism, jolting in its lightning-strike illuminations of malignant lies, secrets, and despair, this is one stormy tale. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1608199436
• ISBN 13: 9781608199433
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240