The Forgotten Condition of Things
Evelyn Moore, a clinical psychologist, has joined the staff of a mental hospital on the edge of the Maine North Woods. Now, attending daily to the disintegrating personalities of others, she finds her own fragile identity, stitched together out of her troubled past, beginning to unravel. Moreover, the hospital, known to the patients as "The House," awakens in Evelyn a growing and tangible dread. Does the institution harbor some malevolence? But soon Evelyn's attention turns to Sophie, a young patient whose wild life has brought her to the hospital in handcuffs. Sophie views the world differently. She doesn't speak to the hospital staff but communicates with spirits. Here in this enigmatic insitution, where the boundaries between physical and mental realities continually shift and blur, these two women look for their separate salvations through one another and through the alliance of spirits and patients inhabiting The House.
The geometry of this place rains down on us and down on us, simulating a world. Stone and brick and mortar and steel---exactly the materials someone would use who was trying to construct inertia. The place could be a monastery, a fortress, a museum. But it isn't any of these. We who are in here know what it is: a compound administered by the Bureau for the Correction of Errors. They have to keep the mistakes somewhere. Life is confusing enough without a lot of bad examples running around, tangling our wires, short-circuiting things. Creating sparks the size of Volkswagens.
Here in this forever box-shaped geography, the walls are too much like our parents. We sit with our elbows pulled in, contemplating our Jell-O, worrying over the length and complexity of the corridors, wary of churning into one another like so many bugs in a jar. Somewhere removed, the specialists on human defects stand with their arms folded, observing. One scratches an eyebrow. Another purses his lips. Afterward they'll have coffee together. We're stuck in the middle of nowhere, but not them. They can fall back on deliberation and caution. They can fall back on the fact that we're in here to begin with, which must count for something. Whatever mistakes they make won't be enough to land them in where we are.
"How could you not be swept away by a book of precisely crafted sentences: prose written with the kind of attention to detail readers hardly ever see anymore. You don't skip a sentence in this finely structured novel; you pause and go back and read it again for the lyricism there to be savored."
---Bangor Daily News
'Robert Froese . . . has crafted a piece of hushed beauty and subtle terror.'
---The Portland Phoenix
'. . . a beautiful novel, subtle and moving, a work of astounding profundity. The characters are impressively well-drawn and convey great psychological richness.'
---Violaine Huisman, Seven Stories Press