Constance by Patrick McGrath

 Constance by Patrick McGrath

This is a period novel. It is an odd period. It is set in NYC in the early 1960s. Penn Station is being torn down. This fact becomes a sort of metaphor for social institutions decaying and being torn down. The enormous monumental train station that seemed so permanent, and perhaps should have been, is coming down and it is a slow painful dirty process. This is not the “swinging ‘60s” this is the prefeminist, echos of the 1950s, 1960s. And the city is changing demographically which upsets the white conservative character in the novel.

This is the story of a marriage between a twice previously married older professor/writer and a young woman, new in town and an editor.
The writer is working on a book he is calling The Coservative Heart. The novel doesn’t state the point of view of this work or anything else about it other than that the character Sidney, the British man living in New York writing it, is having a hard time with it.

He meets young Constance at a book party on Sutton Place. It is love at first sight. He wants to be with her and somehow can detect her loneliness and damage.

The story is told in two voices, there are chapters in Sidney’s voice and others in the voice of Constance.

The feel of the novel is dark gothic in the settings of her ramshackle, in disrepair, family house upstate along the Hudson River and in Sidney's enormous dark upper west side apartment. The house has been in the troubled family for a couple of generations. Constance’s grandfather built out a smaller house with ostentatious towers. She has lived there with her distant father and her younger sister who she had to mother after their mother’s early death.

There are murky dark secrets up there that had traumatized Constance and her sister and maybe her unfeeling doctor father. All these secrets are revealed in the course of the novel.
Sidney has trouble finding his way through the morass of Constance’s family mess, often seeing and taking the father’s point of view without enough information to justify that and to the added distress of Constance. Part of the gothic bind for Constance is that she is trapped between these to patriarcal older men, her elderly father and her new husband 20 some years older than she is.

It is a dark, interesting drama of family and a marriage relationship.
McGrath has a way of making an America Gothic melodrama, out of ordinary life,  that is convincing and disturbing.