Storm At The Door - reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

I found it a frustrating experience reading Stefan Merrill Block’s second novel The Storm At The Door (Faber, $36.99). In many ways this is an extraordinary piece of fiction and yet never have I so wanted to pick up an editor’s red pen and get to work. Take this sentence in the opening chapter: “Katharine passes through the musty, tenebrous living room, which always seems resentful of sunlight, seems to be the place nighttime gathers to hide from the summer’s unblinking sun stare”.  This is a complicated way of saying the room lacks light is and, while it’s symbolic and Block is setting up his story about the dark places inside all of us, it’s overdone and his use of words too creative writing class clever for me 

While I didn’t always find his prose style pleasing, I remain impressed by this novel and here’s why. Block has written, from his own point of view, a fictionalised version of his grandparent’s history, taking us inside the imagined emotional lives of these two troubled people, brilliantly and memorably

His grandmother Katharine has rushed in to a wartime marriage with handsome, charming Frederick Merrill but there is another side to the man as she soon discovers. Alcohol abuse, infidelities, peculiar public behavior, she suffers in silence. Then Frederick is arrested one night for drunkenly flashing at motorists and, with her family’s support, she commits him to high-end Boston mental asylum the Mayflower for the “rest” he needs.

The depiction of Frederick’s period of incarceration is vivid and utterly involving. Surrounding by crazed mutterers and deranged geniuses he struggles to come to grips with his own instability and find a way back to the world. Meanwhile Katharine is at the family’s lakeside summer cottage trying to keep up appearances and wondering why life is not as perfect as it promised to be.

This is a story of love gone wrong, it turns the minds of its characters inside out and shows the ragged seam between sanity and madness. Each chapter is prefaced by pictures of the pair - Frederick wearing his Naval uniform and Katharine got up in her best fur, both impossibly young and hopeful which adds to the poignancy.

At some points almost documentary in style, Block’s attempt to understand what is grandfather went through and how his grandmother coped has been informed by interviews with their surviving acquaintances and his reading about mental institutions and manic depression. His genius is in the way he brings alive all this information and fills in the gaps with fiction.

So why air so much of his family’s dirty laundry in the first place? For Block it seems to be a bid to understand his own periodical “strangeness’. Has he inherited more from his grandfather than his intellect and writing talent? Is this a mental illness or just the way he is?

This Texas-born author is only 29 and perhaps that explains his unrestrained passion for words. At his hands the dictionary gets a thorough working over. As I read I wished he’d been able to pare things back as sometimes the language obscures when it ought to illuminate what is a sensitive and haunting story.

Footnote:
Nicky Pellegrino is a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction - Delicious, Summer at the Villa Rosa, The Italian Wedding , Recipe for Life and her latest The Villa Girls, published in April this year.

She is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 18 September, 2011