The main story of Love in the Asylum is simple enough.  Alba meets Oscar at the Abenaki Mental Hospital.  She is manic depressive and he is an addict.  They fall in love.  Alba finds the letters of a former patient written in the blank pages at the backs of books.  The woman's name is Mesatawe, although she is known as Mary.  She is of American Indian descent, and she was placed in the asylum by her husband in 1933.  Mary writes to her son Peter, although she never sends the letters because she is allowed no contact with her children.  It is not clear at first what reason was given for her incarceration in the asylum, but as we read more of her letters interspersed with the accounts of the faltering romance between Alba and Oscar, we learn that she believes that she has mystical powers.  There is some question whether she is right or whether this is a symptom of her schizophrenia, and it is not a question that is ever resolved by the narrative, but it seems fairly clear that Carey is very sympathetic to the plight of this woman who has suffered at the hands of white men.  We find that Alba suffers from neglect from her own father who has been jetting off around the world throughout her many hospitalizations.  More dramatically, we find that Oscar's self-defeating behavior seems to be related to his self-sacrifice in his relationship with his abusive grandfather as a way to protect his brother.  In short, all three of the main characters have suffered at the hands of powerful men who were meant to be their protectors.  While author Lisa Carey stops short of suggesting that their mental troubles are just a result of the way that they have been treated, it is clear that for Mary her supposed treatments were little more than forms of behavior controls and even punishments when she failed to be a model patient. 

The questions that propel the novel along, such as whether Alba and Oscar will be able to overcome their personal hurdles in order to form a satisfying and mutually supportive relationship, what will happen to Mary, and how will Mary's letters affect Alba, do all get resolved.  There is enough characterization to make the reader want to know what happens, and there's enough variety in the narrative to keep the reader interested — some chapters are in the first person told by Alba or Oscar, others are in the third person, focusing on one of them, and there are case reports about them as well as the letters of Mary.  Personally, I found Oscar the most interesting character with his struggles with his cravings for alcohol, going from his initial denial of his problems, to his frustration that his cravings interfered with his ability to form a genuine relationship with Alba, to his gaining control of his actions. 

Carey has received high praise for her previous two novels, but while she does have a facility to create an interesting storyline, Love in the Asylum conveys a sense of being driven by an idea rather than by the characters themselves.  It is mildly stimulating but it is content to remain at a relatively superficial level rather than really go deep.  One gets little sense of the panic attacks that strike Alba and Mary's despair at her situation and the meaning of her exploration of her healing powers are kept at a distance from the reader.  The book is notable because it explores themes about the relationship between madness and magic that are not often raised in other novels, but it doesn't seem that Carey really has much to say on the topic.

© 2005 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction