As one critic recently observed, no one does psychosis better than Patrick McGrath. In his novels “Spider,” “Asylum” and this year’s “Constance,” he’s created a gallery of the marvelously mad, perhaps because he knows the territory: A forensic psychiatrist’s son, he grew up on the grounds of Broadmoor, a maximum-security mental hospital in Britain. “My father’s work had a huge influence on my own,” he says. “I knew many of his patients and acquired a fascination with all aspects of mental illness and its treatment.” The self-destructive heroine of “Constance” — a woman with major daddy issues — plays out across “Mad Men”-era Manhattan, where McGrath moved more than 32 years ago. Here’s what’s in his library.
The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink
by Olivia Laing
Here is a book which closely examines the working lives and destructive drinking habits of, among others, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. It’s fascinating, at times profound, and breaks new ground in its portraits of these writers.
Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
“Lolita” was a more scandalous book than “Pale Fire,” but in terms of madness, “Pale Fire” is a more wildly inventive novel, largely because the narrator is so gloriously delusional. His name is Charles Kinbote, and he’s a professor at an obscure New England college who transcribes a 999-line poem he believes refers to his own sad story. Brilliant black humor.
Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
Rhys took the character of Bertha Rochester, the madwoman in the attic of “Jane Eyre,” and traces her history back to the island of Domenico, where Bertha, in another life, was a Creole heiress. Rhys shows how a cold man drove this poor woman mad, and why she burned his house down: It’s an extraordinary proto-feminist novel.
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Here we have a story of romantic love so large, so intense, that there’s no room for niceness or kindness or very much tenderness, even. Heathcliff is a magnificent lover — cruel, passionate, destructive, elemental. A huge masterpiece, it will live forever.