Review by Booklist Review
If only Oates, the creator of endlessly imaginative and unflinching tales of the suffering and resilience of girls and women, made up the cruel and macabre surgeries and treatments Silas Weir performs at the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics. Instead, Weir and his medical atrocities are based on the actual practices of three real-life American mid-nineteenth-century physicians. Oates exposes her mad doctor's twisted psyche--he is a monster of anger and ambition--and gives voice to young Brigit Kinealy, upon whom he relentlessly experiments and deliriously desires, married as he is with nine children. Weir maniacally and successfully pursues a cure for the miseries of fistula, but he also develops diabolical ways to break women who attempt to live outside gender strictures. Through the alleged writings of Weir, his eldest son, and other intriguing chroniclers, we witness brutal and gruesome procedures in close-up detail, pushing this antebellum novel into the realm of horror, even as Oates sticks to the chilling facts about the time's vehement misogyny and appalling crimes routinely perpetuated against women. Other revelations include the harsh plight of indentured Irish immigrants such as Brigit and midwife Gretel, whose servitude parallels the enslavement of Africans. Oates' daring tale of grotesque medical experiments and other injustices is unnerving, illuminating, suspenseful, mythic, and, thankfully, tempered by transcendence and love.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Oates (Zero-Sum) delivers a deliciously arch and relentlessly gloomy fictional biography of Dr. Silas Aloysius Weir, a character based on two 19th-century doctors. Weir, known during his time as the "Father of Modern Gyno-Psychiatry," was also called the "Red-Handed Butcher" for his gruesome experiments on women during his 35-year stint at the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics in Trenton. The bulk of the novel is presented as a Nabokovian manuscript composed of accounts by Weir's colleagues, family members, and patients, which have been assembled and annotated by his oldest son, Jonathan. Banished from a Pennsylvania hospital after a failed cranial surgery on an infant, Weir applies his "colossal egotism" to his new patients at the asylum, asserting that "mental illness in females is a consequence of infection, particularly of the female genitals." To that end, he turns a tablespoon into a speculum and introduces sadistic treatments with misleading names like the "Chair of Tranquility." The recipient of many of his surgeries is Brigit Kenealy, a young, indentured albino Irish servant who becomes his romantic obsession and assistant. Oates's scathing indictment of the physical and psychological treatment of women by the medical establishment makes for compulsive but challenging reading. Unlike the ghastly procedures depicted, Oates's inventive gothic novel pays off. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
New Jersey history meets Oates at her most gothic. Exhibit A: a bumbling fellow, Silas Weir, who can't quite get anything right, a disappointment to his parents for not making it into Harvard even as a legacy, a man horrified at the thought of women's private parts ("loathsome in design, function, & aesthetics")--which makes his determination to become "the father of gyno-psychiatry" all the odder. "His head was overlarge upon his stooped & spindly shoulders; his stiff-tufted hair of no discernible hue, neither dark nor fair, needed a more expert trimming; his eyes rather deep-set in their sockets, like a rodent's eyes, damp & quick-shifting." He cuts not much of a figure himself, but in Oates' grim yarn, narrated in the stiff Victorian prose of the era, Weir does plenty of cutting: As the director of the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics, he has plenty of captive subjects from whom to remove uteruses and repair fistulae, with which he has a particular fascination. One inmate is a young, deaf-mute Irish woman named Brigit Kinealy, who, in a Stockholm syndrome exercise, becomes Weir's assistant "before she had fully recovered her physical strength," a recovery made all the less complete because, Weir realizes, he left a sponge sewn up inside her. Brigit, enslaved in all but name, proves to have inner resources of her own, ways of dealing with the "butcher of girls & women" that Weir, ever more obsessed, becomes, as he's bent on proving the notion (and thereby winning Papa's approval at last) that in his campaign advocating "the removal of infected female organs" lay the cure for any psychiatric disorder a woman might endure. It all makes for a creepy, circuitous tale--one based on actual history--made all the more sinister by the putatively good intentions of Weir's son, an abolitionist and advocate for the freedom of everyone but poor Brigit. Vintage Oates: splendidly written, and a useful warning to choose your doctors wisely. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
