50 years after Cuckoo, a new voice on mental illness

‘The Isolation Door’ combines a coming of age story with a harrowing glimpse at life for the family of a schizophrenic. As you might guess, even the coming of age/love story gets subsumed by the tragic messiness of mental illness. The novel is well-plotted and the writing is white-hot good.

The author pokes at the mental health bureaucracy (‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ is fifty years old, can so little have changed?). At first I thought the setting must be some backwoods part of eastern Canada, because in the age of lawsuits, I couldn’t imagine a mental health facility in the U.S. operating like the one portrayed. Throughout the book I thought there were subtle Canadian references, but then, later in the story New York State was explicitly mentioned.

The main character has been wounded by having his lovely Bengali-American mother fall into madness during his childhood. The book shows some of the extra cultural challenges of being a hyphenated American in that situation. For example, he is passive at every turn. When he does engage with the outside world, he picks an oddly troubled pack.

Few of the characters were attractive to me. Maybe it’s a generational thing–that is: I’m too old. Since the writing itself is very good, I’d like to see more by the author! Perhaps younger readers will relate more to this story.