Michael Dirda

Note that ominous phrase "how we were then." Throughout Trauma, McGrath shifts the narrative back and forth through time. The reader knows that something life-altering is going to happen, but for Weir it has clearly already happened. What is it? From what vantage point does Charlie Weir now look back on his past? Repeatedly, he hints at wisdom gained too late: "One of the rewards of maturity, I told myself, in a rare burst of complacency, is the ability to make a rapid decision on a matter of profound emotional significance and have confidence in its soundness. The folly in this line of thinking didn't become apparent until later."

And so gradually, relentlessly, McGrath builds up an atmosphere of unease. After Nora starts to suffer nightmares of being chased in a tunnel, Weir grows convinced she needs therapy. It would appear that brother Walt knows more about this mysterious young woman than he's letting on. Suddenly, Agnes re-enters her ex-husband's life, holding out the possibility of reconciliation. Meanwhile, Weir keeps having his own nightmares, usually the old dream of his father putting a gun to his head. "In the darkness," he tells us, "anxiety steals in like a wolf. Glimpsing weakness of spirit it circles for the kill." He later adds that "in the years I'd been treating trauma I'd learned this, that when ordinary anxiety becomes sufficiently acute it will rouse the dormant horror no matter how deeply repressed it is."

Rousing dormant horror doesn't sound like a very happy prospect. Could Dr. Weir be more like his traumatized patients than he realizes? McGrath deepens the ambiguities and tensions down to the very last chapter of Trauma. Even then, some elements of the story's plot remain deliberately unresolved or enigmatic. And when the book is over, the reader is still left wondering about the precise tone, the actual implication, of its final sentences.

Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair -- assuming, of course, there is any difference. The contemporary novel of terror typically focuses on the breakdown of personality, the return of the repressed, the untimely mixing of memory and desire. Happily for us wimps, McGrath eschews splatter or gruesomeness, instead relating Charlie Weir's story in clear, quick-flowing prose, as if Dick Francis had rewritten Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. (That last, you'll remember, is the novel that opens: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard.")

Trauma is, in short, a terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge, worried and guessing for 200 pages. Still, I was just a teensy bit wrong about the cannibalism. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com.