Constance
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his new novel (after Trauma), McGrath demonstrates the power of his craft with a thoroughly unlikable protagonist, hell bent on not only her own destruction but also that of everyone around her, escalating a pattern of familial dysfunction that she has the power to stop, yet chooses not to. Hidden motivations cause Constance Schuyler to interfere in her sister Iris's love life and marry Sidney Klein, an older man. As the newly wed Kleins learn a dark secret about Constance's father, Constance's destructive tendencies blossom into full-blown revenge. Parts of the novel are set in 1960s Manhattan, with the dark heart taking place upstate at Ravenswood, the rotting house where Constance and Iris grew up. The story, told in present tense, sometimes by Constance, sometimes by Sidney, reveals Constance as an unreliable, unlikable narrator, but a character more infuriating than tragic, and it's difficult to understand Sidney's motivations for wanting to save her; she doesn't seem worth saving. Despite McGrath's demonstrable skill, the reader will be left with mild irritation rather than catharsis.
