'Madness' chronicles difficult journey -Glen Falls (NY) Post-Star

By Courtney Walsh,
Special to The Post-Star

by Paul Pines

In a market saturated with memoirs, many of them static and self-indulgent, "My Brother's Madness" by Paul Pines shines like a bright star and reads like a fast-paced novel. Pines achieves this pacing by alternating scenes in Brooklyn (1950s-60s), where he and his brother Claude grew up, with scenes from his life in the present (1980s), where he and his wife are traveling to Paris and Rio, trying to negotiate movie rights to Paul's novel, increasingly distressed by Claude's deteriorating mental condition. The parallel scenes run consecutively, so you get a sense of the growing-up struggle between the brothers alongside the current struggle when Claude moves upstate where Paul is trying to start a family.

Among the book's many merits is the sad picture it paints of our country's fragmented mental health system. Claude is bounced from a huge, medieval institution downstate to halfway houses in Glens Falls and Hudson Falls. Everywhere, you see the bureaucratic red tape, the chaos, the underpaid staffs, the doctors, some of them well-meaning, most of them ineffective.

When you've lost your mind, Claude laments near the end, there's nothing left to count on.

Another strong point of the book for me was the evocation of the '50s. If you lived through the time, wherever you were in this country, you'll remember the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Eddie Fisher and Vaughn Monroe's "Ghostriders in the Sky" (I hadn't heard that since the year they took the training wheels off my Schwinn). Even if you weren't a Baby Boomer or a pre-Baby Boomer, there's enough rich detail to put you there near Ebbets Field and on the Lower East Side.

There are heroes in the book and one absolute villain, Betty, the stepmother who poisons the family dog and beats up on Paul and Claude's father when he's sick and bed-ridden. Even a good novelist would be hard-pressed to create a strangely wicked step-mother like this. Which is not to say the characters aren't complex and fully presented. The parents (the father a doctor, the mother a lawyer) are intelligent and creative and driven (unfortunately in opposite directions). Their marriage fragments, setting up Paul's rebellious stage (he skips school most days and steals a car) and his brother's descent into paranoia and much worse.

When Paul recounts his own life, so interesting and varied, it is almost a novel in itself. And he's the most complex character of all, driven by love and guilt. He realizes that while he has helped his brother, he also has betrayed him. Is there an assassin in the caretaker, he wonders later in the book? Maybe, but I think it's the caretaker who triumphs.

There's a marvelously ambiguous moment of redemption near the end where Paul asks his dying brother, do I get another chance? Do I? replies Claude, meaning, among other things, that he gives his blessing to this memoir, their story, which makes heroes out of them, heroes of the inner struggle.

What really drives this book is the author's love and faith in humanity. And the growth of those two things constitute the "inside story" of the book.

And if those aren't enough, the memoir itself is a back-up, since it both suggests and exemplifies the healing power of art.