Asylum by Patrick McGrath

From the Publisher

From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness.

In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting--a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage.

But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues--a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.

New Yorker

Superb.... Asylum is McGrath's most somber and most realistic book, and also his best.

New York Times Book Review

McGrath is a master [whose] novels reverberate with echoes of previous masters of horror, from Poe to Hitchcock to Brian de Palma.... A writer of generous gifts.

Kate Tuttle

Patrick McGrath's stylish new novel, Asylum, should only add to his reputation as the leader of the neo-Gothic pack. Set in a British mental hospital, the book also signals the ascendancy of psychiatrists as the genre's villain of choice, finally replacing vampires. It's not that big a change, if you think about it. But while the undead are only after your blood, shrinks want to mess with your mind.

As does Asylum. It's the story of Stella Raphael, a woman trapped not only by her loveless marriage to Max, the hospital's assistant superintendent, but also by the claustrophobic life (including a big house on the hospital grounds) dictated by her husband's job. Stella's smart, sensuous, bored. When she meets Edgar Stark, a handsome sculptor who murdered, decapitated and mutilated his wife, her overripe loneliness bursts. Recklessly, dreamily, she begins an affair that threatens her sanity as well as her arriage.

Enter Peter Cleave, the narrator. He's Edgar's psychiatrist, Max's colleague and Stella's confidante; yet his interest is more than personal, it's professional. Peter specializes in "the catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession." In Stella's story, he finds plenty of material. Despite Peter's warnings and Max's growing suspicions, Stella can't give up Edgar. In a plot as delectably twisted as his characters, McGrath scripts Stella's flight from the hospital's stultifying tension to two very different hellholes -- first on the lam with Edgar, later in a desolate Welsh farmhouse with Max and their son, Charlie.

If, as one of McGrath's characters says, "psychiatry attracts people with high anxiety about going mad," then Peter is an anomaly. He betrays as little anxiety as any good psychopath; he is already mad. Since McGrath studs the narrative with hints of Peter's oddly proprietary air toward "his" Edgar, we are less surprised than thrillingly creeped-out by the good doctor's glee when circumstances place Stella under his care. At last, he says, he can start "stripping away her defenses and opening her up, seeing what that psyche of hers really looked like."

An insane narrator, rampant symbolism and the near-inevitability of a movie deal (Jeremy Irons, anyone?) could make Asylum unbearable, a mere bag full of gimmicks. But instead, it's outrageously fun. Smart, frightening, funny and surprisingly affecting, McGrath's latest elevates the psychiatric case-study to high art. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

McGrath (Dr. Haggard's Disease) has a mind that revels in the toxic side of things. In this tale of headlong descent into darkness and despair, the toxicity comes from obsessional love. Stella Raphael is the lovely but dissatisfied wife of Max, a resident psychiatrist at an asylum for the criminally insane in the countryside near London. She becomes infatuated with Edgar Stark, a sculptor who murdered and mutilated his wife in a delusionary fit, and the two contrive a passionate affair when Edgar is assigned to work in the Raphaels' garden on the asylum grounds. Stealing Max's clothes, Edgar escapes to London and goes underground, where Stella eventually follows him. When he begins to manifest the same furious jealousies that led to his wife's murder, she flees home again, only to find she has ruined her husband's career. The Raphaels, with their young son, Charlie, are exiled to a remote hospital in rural Wales, where further disaster strikes as Stella drifts into her own desperate delusions. The story is told by another psychiatrist at the asylum, ostensibly through interviews with Stella. Although the doctor's own interpolations are sometimes a relief in the supercharged atmosphere, this seems an unnecessary device, and the intended frisson of his participation in the somber conclusion doesn't come off. In every other respect, however, the book is hypnotizing, with its own strange but darkly convincing pace and style; and the way in which nature and climate are woven into the fabric of the bizarre couple's strange love is masterly.

Library Journal

In McGrath's latest, which Random hopes will be his breakout book, the bored but gorgeous wife of a boring but successful psychiatrist launches a devastating affair with a sculptor who murdered his wife.

Michael Wood

The triumph of this novel is that this unthinkable folly is made to seem an honorable if destructive option.
--The New York Times Book Review

Michiko Kakutani

Taut, tension-filled... a chilling story that works as both a Freudian parable and an old-fashioned gothic shocker.
-- The New York Times

People Weekly

Beautifully written, morally complex, utterly convincing.

Los Angeles Times

A book as absorbing as it is intelligent.... The story of this love affair unfolds like a dream into a nightmare -- the characters move relentlessly toward their tragic end with desire raging like a fire, gathering strength and destroying everything and everyone in it spath.

Kirkus Reviews

A contemporary master of highbrow gothic fiction, McGrath (Dr. Haggard's Disease, 1993, etc.) sticks to worldly psychopathology in his icy new novel.

At the center of this study in "morbid obsessional sexual compulsion" is Stella Raphael, a British woman of extraordinary beauty married to a dull, unimaginative, cold forensic psychiatrist. Which makes life hard for the passionate Stella, who soon finds herself infatuated with one of the inmates at the maximum security institution where her husband works. Edgar Stark, a sculptor with a distinct "animal vitality," suffers from 'morbid delusions." Insane jealousy inspired by these delusions led him to bludgeon his wife to death. A trusty at the hospital, Edgar works on the grounds of Stella's house, where their daily chats soon escalate into sweaty ruttings in the gazebo. After Edgar escapes, Stella follows him, but life underground with Edgar in London quickly becomes hard and shabby, and Stella misses her ten- year-old son. When Edgar's explosive jealousy emerges once again, Stella goes home. Her husband loses his job, and the family is forced into exile in Wales. In deep depression, Stella engages in meaningless sex with her landlord, drinks herself into a stupor, and watches, helpless, as her son drowns on a school outing. Found to be negligent, judged to be mad, she winds up in the very institution where her husband used to work, and where Stark is now an inmate again. But the real twist to this otherwise melodramatic tale is the narrator, himself a staff psychiatrist who treats both Stella and Edgar, and who also has designs on Stella—yet another man trying to possess this free spirit.

The unreliability of the narrator, the intense psychological layerings of the narrative, and the fevered interpretations of events by McGrath's characters make for a truly complex (but never obscure) novel. McGrath, always a worthy descendant of Poe, here takes things a level higher—producing fiction in the tradition of Henry James.

What People Are Saying

Tobias Wolff
Asylum has the drive and suspense of the most shameless thriller. Inevitability of myth, the narrative complexity of Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw. It is, I believe, a masterpiece -- fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore.

Josephine Hart
Asylum -- ironically titled -- tells a cool story of a literally mad obsession with cool precision and fiercly elegant control. This is a shimmering, brilliant novel.

Mary Karr
Patrick McGrath's cool manoevers of voice and plot make this passionate story of sexual obsession one of the best I've ever read. This book has the unbeatable combination of page-turner plot and artistic brilliance.

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Interviews & Essays

Q:  Who would you consider your literary influences?

A:  My strongest influences are probably John Hawkes and Edgar Allan Poe. Also Melville, Conrad, and Waugh, Iris Murdoch, the Brontes, John Banville, and Peter Carey.

Q:  Did growing up near Broadmoor Hospital influence your writing career? How did it influence your writing of Asylum?

A:  Growing up near Broadmoor provided me with a deep imaginative reservoir of knowledge of, and fascination with, psychiatry and insanity. This I was unaware of until I began writing fiction, since when I have exploited it ruthlessly. The architecture and society of Broadmoor I replicated as faithfully as I could in ASYLUM. The story came from a hint of a scandal I heard of as a boy. The characters are all my own.

Q:  What was it like growing up the son of a medical superintendent?

A:  Being the son of a superintendent is a demanding business, as superintendents tend to be strong, authoritative figures. My father taught me much about his work that has proved invaluable to me as a writer. At the same time his expectations of me were high, which was a great spur and an antidote to sloth.

Q:  Do you enjoy splitting your time between New York City and London? Do you have a preference?

A:  New York has been my home since 1981. I learned to write here and have many friends in the city. I love New York. I am beginning to see the point of London, and live there happily during the summers. But nothing can touch that first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline as you come roaring in from JFK.

Q:  Have you read anything within the past couple of months that you would highly recommend?

A:  I would always recommend very highly Denis Johnson's new book, Already Dead: A California Gothic, which I consider a masterpiece. Other good recent reads: Bringing Out the Dead by Joe Connelly, Night Train by Martin Amis, and No Lease On Life by Lynne Tillman.

Reading Group Guide

1. Stella thinks Edgar "was guilty of a crime of passion; and passion, in essence, was good, surely?" [p. 17]. "With Stella it was always the heart, the language of the heart" [p. 29]. Peter Cleave classifies Stella as a romantic. Is Stella a romantic? If so, what does her subsequent behavior indicate about romanticism?

2. "As a psychiatrist I wasn't in the business of moral judgments" [p. 21], Peter says, and he later tells Stella, "It's only when we feel pain, or the prospect of it, that we start to make distinctions between right and wrong" [p. 148]. Is Peter correct? What does he reveal about himself in making this statement?

3. Peter believes that Stella's behavior is linked to a desire to hurt Max. "Perhaps that's the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else's happiness?" [p. 34]. How much of Stella's behavior springs from hostility and hate? To what degree is passionate, romantic love inspired by hate or aggression?

4. "Most of us are dying of chronic neglect!" Stella says [p. 48], referring to wives in general and herself in particular. Is Max really neglectful of Stella? What makes her believe that she is being neglected and taken for granted?

5. Discussing Edgar's condition, paranoia, with Stella, Jack says "we don't really know how to treat them. Because we don't really understand what they are." [p. 72] Is he talking about his patients, she wondered, or women? Why does Stella think this at this time? What is the cause of her anger? Is Stella resentful at being a woman in a male community?

6. What is Stella's reaction when Jack tells her thatEdgar had decapitated his wife and taken her eyes out? What does this reaction say about her, her motivations, her state of mind?

7. The action of Asylum takes place over the course of exactly one year. Why does the author present the story in this way? How do the seasons, and the change of seasons, affect Stella's thoughts and emotions?

8. What can you deduce about Max's feelings for Stella from the way the story is told? Does he act from love, from hate, from a mixture of the two? Do you find Max a sympathetic character, or do you agree with Stella that he is cold and sexually indifferent to her?

9. Stella tells Peter that during the early days of their romance she and Edgar experienced "a breakdown of their separate egos, a falling away of personality, a sense of identity, a sense that they were essence to essence..." [p. 78]. Do you believe that Edgar experienced this in the same way?

10. We see Brenda principally from Stella's point of view. Is she actually as unpleasant a character as Stella finds her to be? What purpose does she serve in helping to understand Stella?

11. How does Stella define the term "freedom"? When she claims to be seeking freedom, what does she mean? Is the sort of freedom she craves really possible? Does she ever find it?

12. How would you characterize the relationship between Stella and Charlie, and how does it change during the course of the novel? Does she behave as a typical mother? How does her erratic behavior toward Charlie in Wales illuminate the deterioration of her psyche?

13. "Was she really so blind to the danger she had placed herself in?" Peter asks himself. "Had she learned nothing from living among psychiatrists?" [p. 95]. What do you think: is she really blind, or does she choose to be so? Or does she willingly court danger, and if so, to what end? In her dealings with Edgar, do you find that Stella deliberately provokes him to violence?

14. What motivates Nick, very much at his own risk, to shelter Edgar from the law and, ultimately, to shelter Stella from Edgar? Do you believe that he enjoys the element of danger that his actions provoke? Do you think that he loves Stella? Or that it is Edgar he loves

15. Why does Max take Stella back after her return from London, and why does she decide to stay with him? Why does Max decline to tell Stella that Edgar might have made his way to Wales [pp. 184-85]?

16. Why does Stella allow Charlie to drown? Might his death be beneficial to achieving her desires? Does she really imagine that it is Edgar she sees sinking beneath the waves? Does Peter believe her when she makes this claim, or does he imply that she is lying?

17. "You had to explain it. . . either she was a monster or she was mad" [p. 202]. Peter decides to believe in her madness: "a classic Medea complex" [p. 211]; Max adopts a more theological outlook, positing the reality of good and evil: "She should be in prison" [p. 228]. Which man do you agree with? Is Stella evil, or merely misguided?

18. Edgar "idealized" Stella, Peter claims, "and then had to struggle against the chaos of his own passions when the image he'd created could no longer be sustained. I think perhaps it's what he was unconsciously trying to get at in his last sculpture, despite his claim to be engaged in an attempt to overthrow habit and convention in seeing" [p. 253]. Do you find this connection between Edgar's art and his feelings to be a plausible one?

19. As the novel progresses, Peter reveals more and more of his character, his will, and his motivations to the reader. Just how unambitious or ambitious is he? What are his real feelings toward Stella? What are his feelings toward Edgar? How far has he succeeded in manipulating the action, and the characters? What does the last sentence of the novel suggest?

20. Why do you think McGrath has chosen "Asylum" as the title for his book? What are the two meanings of the word, and are they connected or contradictory? At home with Max, Stella thinks of the asylum as a prison; frightened and penniless in London, she remembers it as a "misty mental realm where the sun always shone and order prevailed... a castle keep on a rocky ridge, and within its walls security and plenty" [p. 117]. In your opinion, what is the real character of the asylum?

Read an Excerpt