cover image The Desperate Season

The Desperate Season

Michael Blaine. William Morrow & Company, $24 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-688-16441-6

An expertly realized account of mental illness, family trauma and violence, this first novel combines literary power with all-too-clear contemporary relevance. In the events at its harrowing center, Maurice, a young schizophrenic, stages a massacre with a semiautomatic rifle. The narration divides among six characters, beginning and ending with Maurice himself--a risky but ultimately successful device that allows readers to establish an empathy that balances the horror of the acts Maurice commits after escaping from the local mental hospital near his home in the Upper Catskills. Buying a semiautomatic with distressing ease, Maurice seeks out his divorced parents for a confrontation that quickly envelops the entire town. Maurice's father, Nathan, is a local bank president who loves Maurice unconditionally, but has a dark side of his own--he finances his gambling habit by embezzling from accounts. Moira, Maurice's selfish mother, balances her love with fear: ""Under the influence of his medication he's so calm he seems like a Buddhist. No, it's finding a way to speak to him. Groping for something to say is agony... "" Soon, Maurice is holding his parents and sister, Chrissie, hostage. Also drawn in is Vince, a lawyer with a son of his own to raise, a love affair (now finished) with Moira and a secret reason to care for Maurice. Blaine's narrative never descends to exploitation of the teen violence in current headlines: instead, it's determinedly literary, psychologically acute, disturbing in the best sense of that word. In his remote and claustrophobic upstate mountain towns, Blaine creates a landscape as unforgiving as Maurice's mind. But his best creation is Maurice himself, a brilliant, sometimes charming young man who has the burden of perceiving the world in a way alien to the rest of us. 10-city author tour. (Sept.)