Synopsis
Charlie Weir grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a supremely dysfunctional family: his father absenting himself, his mother battling depressive illness, his brother fighting him for whatever comfort remained. So no wonder he studied psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, eventually establishing a practice back in New York just as the first brutalized veterans of Vietnam started returning home with a world of hurt. Agnes, the sister of one of these men, soon became his wife, though her brother's death ended their marriage just as surely, stranding their daughter in between them and leaving Charlie to endure alone as his city fell further into a stupor of violence and mayhem. Then, years later, things begin to happen. His mother's death brings Agnes back into his life at last, and Walt, his brother, introduces him to a woman who first enlivens and then endangers everything Charlie hoped might restore his dwindling faith in himself, his calling, and his future.
This novel is like watching a ghastly accident in slow motion, with an expert voice over made by one of its participants. "Physician, heal thyself" is an expression that comes increasingly to mind as events spiral madly out of control and this story races, heedlessly and heart-strong, toward its shocking conclusion. It encapsulates the themes -- family, passion, madness -- that by now have become synonymous with Patrick McGrath.
The Washington Post - Michael Dirda
Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair—assuming, of course, there is any difference. The contemporary novel of terror typically focuses on the breakdown of personality, the return of the repressed, the untimely mixing of memory and desire. Happily for us wimps, McGrath eschews splatter or gruesomeness, instead relating Charlie Weir's story in clear, quick-flowing prose, as if Dick Francis had rewritten Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier…Trauma is, in short, a terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge, worried and guessing for 200 pages.