Genre: General
Fiction
Description:
Several streams of narrative flow together in this panoptic
examination of life, death, and all the madness in between.
Author:
A New Englander by birth and disposition, Ken Weene was trained as a
minister and psychologist and has worked as both an educator and
psychotherapist. Now in semi-retirement, he lives with his wife in Arizona.
Check out Mr. Weene’s Amazon Author page for more of his books.
Appraisal:
I must admit that I didn’t have very high expectations going into
this. Like most books by unfamiliar authors, I could only hope for the best
while preparing for the worst. Luckily for this cynic, however, Memoirs from the Asylum turned out to be
well worth the time spent reading it.
The title seems purposefully ironic. Merriam-Webster defines “asylum”
as “an inviolable place of refuge and protection,” but could such a place
actually exist? With 58 chapters divided between a mental institution and the
equally mad world beyond its walls, this book would seem to answer “no.” In the
narrator’s repeated references to his raging uncle’s depiction of a foundering
ship, forever unfinished upon its easel, the overall message seems to be that
“there is no asylum, no sanctuary, only the endless gray of the tossing seas of
the endless paintings of our endurance.”
Paradoxically, the only asylum to be found anywhere is within the
patients themselves, even as they become prisoners to their own tormented
thoughts. Regardless of their individual limitations and psychoses, they can
each take solace in whatever measure of freedom still exists in their heads –
provided it hasn’t been completely cut, shocked, or drugged out of them
already.
Marilyn for instance, the resident catatonic, hasn’t moved a muscle in
years. Instead, “she sits inert in her room. She stares at the crack in the
wall opposite her bed. She stares at nothing, and she sees the world.” It is a
world inhabited by her childhood sweetheart, her dead mother and brother, and
their beloved family dog, taking turns in each others’ roles while perpetually
morphing into penises, balls of excrement, and various other objects across a
range of fantastical scenarios.
The scatological motif is fitting, given how the patients are
typically treated – like crap. One callous orderly “look[ed] more like he
should [have been] working in a steel mill or chopping down trees,” the
narrator tells us. “but there are no mills, mines, or forests, not around here.
We’re the industry, the factory: human waste management at its most medical.”
If they’re not written off or forgotten altogether, the patients are
routinely abused by those in position to do so. This is what inevitably happens
wherever power is exercised over those with few, if any, rights as human
beings. With the exception of one empathetic doctor and a handful of workers,
most of the staff seem more interested in pushing pills and preparing budget
reports than providing any kind of real care.
Mind you, the patients aren’t the only loons in this bin. Everyone
else gets to go home at the end of the day, but given the pathological nature
of the world outside, it comes as no surprise that they all have certain
“issues” of their own. Everyone is crazy, but everyone knows this deep down.
The world itself is an insane asylum, but once again, there is no point in
telling this to those of us forced to live in it. Weene is adept at showing
this, though, and he does so with a panache that would make the narrator’s
departed cousin, Stan, whoop for the sheer joy of it.
The book comes to a rather predictable conclusion, but that’s probably
just because there’s no other conclusion to be drawn. Upon his release, it
doesn’t take our narrator long to rediscover all of the awful, maddening things
that led him to commit himself in the first place. What keeps him going is “the
possibility of something better, of something however fragile rising from
momentary glory, from a lavender and apricot moment of joy.” The book isn’t
quite as flowery as all that, or even as dismal as the image of the foundering
ship mentioned earlier. It’s a lot of different, contrary things, but what else
should we expect from a book about insanity?
FYI:
Added for
Reprise Review: Memoirs from the Asylum by Kenneth Weene was a
nominee in the Contemporary Fiction category for B&P 2013 Readers' Choice
Awards. Original review ran June 26, 2012
Format/Typo
Issues:
The Kindle version I read could do with a major formatting overhaul.
Rating:
***** Five Stars
Reviewed
by: Arthur Graham
Approximate
word count: 55-60,000 words
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