Constance by Patrick McGrath - review by Tom Williams

Tom Williams

Bad Romance

Constance

By

Bloomsbury Circus 244pp £12.99
 

At a 1960s New York drinks party, Constance Schuyler, a young publisher, meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Attracted by her fragile beauty – ‘her porcelain limbs and startled eyes and her sudden throaty laughter’ – he woos her with the sort of lines one might expect of a professor rather than a poet: ‘I’m a fascinating thinker and I love you. What’s not to love back?’ They soon marry and she moves into his intimidating apartment, ‘large and dark and full of books’. Theirs is a chilly relationship – they don’t hug; instead, she stands still and allows him to hold her – but Constance soon develops a fondness for Howard, Sidney’s young son from a previous marriage.

Constance is haunted by the death of her mother from cancer, and disturbed by what’s left of her family: a sister who is drinking heavily and falling into dissipation, and a tyrannical father whom she unequivocally hates. At Christmas, she takes Sidney and Howard to visit her childhood home in

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

RLF - March

A Mirror - Westend

Follow Literary Review on Twitter