LOVE IN THE ASYLUM

The author of, most recently, of In the Country of the Young (2000) again weaves a realistic romance in with a supernatural background.

Maine’s posh Abenaki Hospital for the psychiatrically afflicted and drug-addicted takes its name from an Indian tribe that once offered refuge to white women whose behavior their husbands and society could not tolerate. In the spring of 2003, manic-depressive Alba Elliott is admitted for the umpteenth time since she was 15, when she set fire to her house after her father gave up her newborn son for adoption. This time, she meets heroin addict Oscar Jameson, self-committed under pressure from his long-suffering younger brother, and sparks fly. As the story of their relationship’s bumpy progress is told, so is the tragic story of Mary Doherty, committed to the asylum in 1933. In the hospital library, Alba has discovered letters in which Mary explains herself to her son Peter. The daughter of an Abenaki woman and a white man, she was subject to mysterious fits that her Indian uncle identified as “the dreamer’s gift,” proof that she would be a leader and healer. But when parents and uncle all died in a flu epidemic, the 13-year-old girl was taken to an orphanage and eventually adopted by the sexually abusive Mr. Doherty, who married her off to his son after she got pregnant. The story of how she wound up at the asylum, and of how her efforts to use her mystical powers to help the women there went horribly awry, proves far more compelling than the well-crafted but predictable saga of Alba’s and Oscar’s struggle to conquer their doubts and self-loathing. The same questions infuse past and present stories—about creativity and madness; men defining insanity to control women; the sorrows that linger from our youth—and Carey addresses them with intelligence and subtlety. If only Alba and Oscar were as interesting.

Not quite up to her previous two outings, but a sensitive effort from a talented writer who’s entitled to a near-miss.