Stefan Merrill Block’s first novel, The Story of Forgetting, was based around his own family curse, the Alzheimer’s, and won him ‘Best First Novel’ at the Rome International Festival of Literature in 2008. His second novel, The Storm at the Door, focuses on another family misfortune, one that the author shares with his grandfather – bipolar disorder.
Frederick Merrill, a handsome naval officer, suffers from dark moods and likes to shock his friends. He also regularly cheats on his wife Katharine, the author’s grandmother, as a way of lifting those moods. The tension in the couple’s life reaches its apogee when Frederick decides to expose himself to passing cars one night, and is reported to the police. Katharine makes a decision to send her husband to the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill, maybe as a way to save him, more likely as a punishment for what he had done to her.
As Frederick finds himself locked in a nightmare, he is convinced that if only he uses his real talent, writing, to let his wife know how he feels, Katharine would understand him and help him return to his life. At Mayflower, he meets other patients who the society has declared mentally ill but who – Frederick is certain – are simply misunderstood or traumatised. There is the formidable professor Schultz, a Harvard linguist from a Jewish town of Bolbirosok in Lithuania, destroyed by the Nazis. Having lost all his loved ones, Schultz discovers instead a new language, what he thinks might be the true language of God, and the professor now spends his days writing it down. Everything has a sound – the wind, the steps down the corridor, the pen on paper – and these sounds make a language that he, Schultz, must record.
There is Robert Lowell, a poet who is one of the few voluntary patients at the hospital, and who Frederick looks up to. There is Marvin Foulds, the Mayflower’s most famous patient, a man with fifteen personalities whose case made the career of Dr Wallace, Mayflower’s head psychiatrist. There will also be Rita, a nurse at the Mayflower, who will become Frederick’s ticket to the outside.
The theme of families, and the effect they have on us, dominates the book. Katharine’s decisions are influenced by her cousins’ opinions, her mother’s advice, her father’s money and interference. Frederick’s darkness will be passed on to Merrill Block himself. The family members’ dreams and failures interweave and create a net that is impossible to escape.
But the main topic of the novel is the language, the writing, and what it represents. Frederick’s only hope and saviour is his diary where he records not only the events of his stay at Mayflower, but also his ideas, his innermost thoughts and observations. When the new head psychiatrist, Canon, orders to remove all paper and notebooks from the patients, a rebellion will slowly grow that will eventually end Canon’s career at the institution. The words, the language, are what connects and grounds the characters, what keeps them on this side of sanity.
Any Cop?: The Storm At The Door is a compelling story, even despite its occasional awkward and heavy feel, and the humanness of the characters is a credit to the author. After two books based around his own family’s psychological issues, it would be interesting to see what Merrill Block will set his sights on next.
Maia Nikitina
Bookmunch 