Regular contributor Julie Ann Weinstein has been kind enough to send us another book review – and we encourage you to do the same!  We’re a community that loves to write, but we also love to read and discuss books. Fortunately, there’s such a lot of them!  Tell us what you think and we’ll be happy to post it.

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Kenneth Weene’s jaw-clamping, nerve-spinning novel-like memoir depicts life behind the scenes in a mental asylum.  But this incredible novel is more than just a book about the insane. The characters, in all their crazed-out existences, question what it means to be human and what happens when our greatest fears trap us from living.

Set during the 1970s/1980s, the book is reminiscent of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted, only with a more uplifting, thought- provoking edge. Like its movie predecessors, this novel pits the inmates against the staff, but therein lies the excellent dichotomy that author has developed. In Memoirs of the Asylum, some of the staff members view the mentally insane as mere furniture, yet others  see their own vulnerabilities and frailties mirrored within the patients.

In the view of the narrator, the inmates are controlled by whatever means necessary, including excessive medication, shock treatments and even lobotomies, so that the inmates are kept out of sight from society. To do this, the staff must be willing and able to lie.  Yet neither inmates nor staff fit very well in this pre-ordained script. The characters tend to be a messy, vibrant lot, a point made in the novel’s various discussions of excrement. For, in our most smelly states – in the view of the narrator – we are our most authentic selves. Here, in the proverbial restroom, there is no escape from our basic and most primitive selves.

The sense of “no escape” is a central theme in this novel. The more the patients and staff try to escape from themselves at each harrowing turn, the more they find themselves. The book presents a virtual kaleidoscope of characters losing their minds, and ultimately climaxes with a symphonic roar at the full moon as patients are united in their madness which culminates in a murder. However, this book is anything but gratuitous in its depiction of violence or madness. Each insane person is treated with the utmost care and humanity, and that is the genius behind Weene’s writing and his story’s authenticity.

The character we come know most intimately is the narrator, who is at once an observer and a patient suffering from schizophrenia – but, more to the heart, he is a character making sense of the loss of his best friend, and suffering from immense grief.

He is not the only mourner in this novel. Marilyn, a catatonic patient, is alternately trapped between a variety of layers of grief for her mother, a lost love, and a lost dog. She is the silent hero. Her catatonic state has a transformative effect on the new medical resident, Dr. Buford Ambrose.  He is at once fascinated, mesmerized and disgusted with her state of non-existence – what is, essentially, a waking death. This notion of not-quite-living is symptomatic of many of the inmates, and even staff members. It is Marilyn who has the most powerful effect on another patient, Alan, who finds her captivating and representative of the ideal woman, pure and unmoved by the world around her.

Yet Marilyn’s state is anything but un-removed. She is living in the crack in her room in ways she is afraid to do in the outside world. It is there that she can face her own fears, her own tormentors, over and over. Even though her mini-conquests occur in her mind and in silences, they have an un-gluing effect on Dr. Ambrose, who questions his very fiber as he feels helpless and unable to cure her, and unable to save his own crumbling marriage. At the same time, he grows to care for her. In his near-paternal love for her, a family is formed with both him and Alan as her dutiful suitor.

Alan is the peeping tom, the crazy philosopher, and the man who masturbates at will in front of any and everyone, including circus elephants.  As Marilyn seeps into a deep stupor under the heavy cloak of meds, she becomes a hero to herself as she faces her demons once and for all, while physically she becomes the victim of rape which results in a pregnancy. It is in their collective finest hours that Alan (though he is not the father) chooses to be her husband, and Marilyn breaks through the walls of her existence and says, in her own words, to Dr. Arbrose, “The vacation is over. “ She welcomes impending motherhood. Though the fate of her life, Alan’s life, and the life of their child is up to the asylum, the readers are left with the sense that love and acceptance – while it may not cure lunacy – can dampen its severe decree.

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Julie Ann Weinstein is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, Flashes from the Other World (All Things That Matter Press, fall 2010). To learn more about the authors, visit their websites at www.authorkenweene.com and www.julieweinstein.com.