Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now. Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath's book _Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now_ paints a mesmerizing portrait of people caught up in painful events within and without their lives. It has a haunting quality to it that draws you in. The stories "The Year of the Gibbet" and "Julius" evoke a hypnotic atmosphere of their historic periods; you can feel the wintry cold and smell the smoke and dirt of the characters' surroundings. "Ground Zero" is an amazingly well-done portrait of a complex post-9/11 relationship where an analyst attempts to guide her patient in coming to terms with his new lover's past relationship, which involved both her former boyfriend (now dead) and his father. The pitiful yet magnetic characters are like Edward Gorey drawings brought to life. The stories contain subtly nuanced connections to each other not only in setting (that of the island of Manhattan) but also in specific geographic references, as well as themes of familial and romantic love, honesty, death and evil. Patrick McGrath uses such elegant and well-turned sentences, I felt like I was watching the ghosts of ballroom dancers waltz across a dimly lit stage in an old theatre; the title is an apt fit. Between its captivating style and its length, the book can easily be completed in one or two sittings. _Ghost Town_ is worthy of repeated readings, and I look forward to gaining additional insights into the layers of story upon picking it up again. A thoroughly enjoyable collection of novellas.

The first story called The Year of the Gibbet takes the reader back to 1776 when King George's ships came to conquer Manhattan. It is the sad tale of a boy of ten whose mother becomes a traitor with the British in order to sustain her children. The second story is that of Julius in the 1850s who falls in love with a girl below his rank, a fact which will lead his father to take an unpardonable measure. Love denied can make us mad indeed. In the third story Danny Silver is the narrator's patient whose psychological problem originated in a suffocating maternal relationship. He observed the suffering of a woman he hired for sex, Kim Lee, was affected by it and launched himself in a reckless trajectory with her. The 9/11 terror attacks were so destructive on Danny's psyche that not only did he buy sex but bought a sort of emotional intimacy with a woman who was even more damaged than himself and mistook the comfort it gave him for love. A stunning trio of tales, they are sly and thought-provoking because the author evokes the insanity and violence underlying the surface of everyday life.

GHOST TOWN is part of Bloomsbury's Writer in the City series, in which a writer provides a story that captures the essence of a certain city. In this volume, Patrick McGrath takes on Manhattan and gives us three stories set at different times in the city's history, all of which concern a death. The way we die holds a mirror to how we live and each story provides a vivid picture of the age and the city. "The Year of the Gibbet" takes place during a cholera epidemic. While waiting to succumb to the disease, Edmund reflects on the death of his mother and the role he played in it as a young boy. After the Battle of Long Island, in which the American forces narrowly escaped certain defeat under the cover of a providential storm, Edmund's mother gets involved in a plot to blow up the British ships holding New York harbor. Edmund's inability to lie spontaneously when he and his mother are questioned by British officers dooms her and she is hung as a traitor. Poor Edmund can never forgive himself for his guilelessness, even as his own time runs out. "Julius" brings us to the Gilded Age. Julius is a puzzling disappointment to his father, a successful businessman. The boy's artistic personality inspires his sisters to rescue him by sending him to art school. The impressionable Julius is immediately smitten by his first nude model, a connection wholly inappropriate for a young man of his standing, and Julius's father seeks to put an end to it. The model disappears and Julius, devastated, loses his sanity. He is convinced that the model, Annie, has fallen victim to a sordid plot involving his art teacher and his father. When he lashes out in his own act of violence, he is confined in an asylum for decades. Upon his return to the house where he grew up, the world has passed him by but the truth of his experiences reverberates in the family legend: it is wrong to deny love. Although the least gothic in tone, readers may find that "Ground Zero" is the most affecting of the stories as it deals with 9/11 and shows our own age's ghost stories in the making. Danny Silver has been seeing the same psychiatrist for years. He has intimacy issues, so his doctor is immediately suspicious when he claims to have fallen in love with a prostitute he hired a few days after the planes hit the World Trade Center. The prostitute has issues of her own, not the least being her claim that she is being haunted by a former client, a man who left her bed on 9/11 and went directly to work on the 104th floor. Everyone in this triangle is wounded in some way but the psychiatrist's plight is the most heart-rending. She's too close to Danny and expresses her concern in a way that inevitably drives him further into his troubled relationship. The stories in GHOST TOWN are marked by a shared sense of loss and distance. Readers familiar with Patrick McGrath's earlier works will recognize his interest in violence and madness, as well as his formidable talent.