Haunted house

Robert Froese’s The Forgotten Condition of Things

By Josh Rogers

The Forgotten Condition of Things By Robert Froese, Flat Bay Press. Harrington, ME. 299 pages, $14.

Robert Froese reads at Books Etc., 240 Rte. 1, Falmouth, August 24. Call (207) 781-3784.

MINT CONDITION: Froese depicts relationships supernaturally.

Robert Froese, a writing professor at the University of Maine at Machias, has crafted a piece of hushed beauty and subtle terror with his latest novel, The Forgotten Condition of Things. Something of a ghost story, something of a treatise on the state of the mental-health profession, the book also explores the yawning gulfs that can occur between two people. It’s a novel that deals with edges, be they hard and straight or blurred and indistinct.

Evelyn Moore is a clinical psychologist who suddenly finds herself at the edge of the known world: Maine’s North Woods. She’s been abruptly uprooted to a remote farmhouse in Maine from her suburban Connecticut life by her husband, Richard, who’s involved in a shady, high-stakes real-estate racket and shaken by mafia threats. Evelyn takes a job at the House, at least, that’s what the inmates of the decaying, 100-year-old psychiatric hospital call it: ‘The House’ or, more simply, ‘here.’

But the House is not simply the backdrop to the action; it’s a character itself. It’s institutional granite wall are monstrous and looming. Froese breathes life into its sinister hallways and tangled air-shafts at every turn. And the beast is waiting, watching; the ventilator shafts are its eyes and ears: “entrance to a terrible complexity — more chambers than this house is said to contain. It is a malignant design. The way twists and separates. Along with fumes of combustion and sorrow are particles of predatory thinking. In one of those chambers, someone is listening.”

And there’s something else about the House. In her off hours, Evelyn begins to comb through old hospital records. She discovers an eerie pattern dating back to the ’30s when the records stop: Every few decades there is an episode of mortal violence at the hospital — a doctor hangs himself, gets thrown out a third-story window — followed several days after by an unidentified female patient’s escape. And no one knows how far these incidents go back past the point where the records trickle out. Evelyn notes that the deaths seem to always occur in the fall as she trudges through wet autumn leaves to her car.

The supernatural creepiness escalates as Evelyn meets a mysterious new patient, Sophie Davenport, a “Wild Child” found barefoot in the woods after allegedly attempting to assassinate the governor at a groundbreaking ceremony. Mute, intentionally or otherwise, the Davenport girl is being evaluated at the hospital to determine whether she is criminally insane. Inexplicably drawn to her, Evelyn begins seeing the girl on the sly. Though Sophie remains silent, the two forge an emotional connection; it’s as if they are two different halves of the same person. Froese charts their strange journey together in chapters that flip back and forth between Evelyn’s point of view and Sophie’s spirit world.

Through Sophie’s eyes, and through several of the other patients, Froese paints a rather damning picture of the mental-health profession. And rather than simply point his finger, Froese manages to indict the system with poignancy, humor, and not without sympathy for its practitioners. Although most of the doctors at the hospital are good enough souls, Sophie isn’t letting them off the hook, either. Explaining her silence, she thinks “There wasn’t any reason to talk anyway . . . I was already there on their pages, for them to thumb through. They’d delivered the real me on their clipboards only to verify against this mess bundled in from the October weather.” Another patient, the trickster Roland Rye, cleverly demonstrates how people become patients, spouting off “A file. See? One moment ‘life,’ the next moment ‘file.’ Hah! Presto! They love it.”

Whether spinning ghost stories or illuminating the gaps that still exist in the psychiatric field, Froese is everywhere concerned with the distances between people. The lines of demarcation. Walls and, occasionally, bridges.

Every evening after her shift at the House, Evelyn walks out to her car, turns the ignition, and drives the half hour to her home — to her husband, who seems to never quite look at her, to never quite hear her. The Richard she fell in love with was, even then, self-absorbed, but at least he was striving for something more, working on his anthropology thesis. Now, he seems to get by speculating on questionable real estate. The silences that pass between them are telling. The “carefully blank expression”s and paste-on smiles conceal a bankrupt marriage.

Froese artfully renders every line of this “architecture of living” that “over the seasons and years sculpt[s] out certain rooms, obstruct[s] certain doorways.” And the author shares a talent with Raymond Carver in that he gives us a sense of the yawning void that separates Evelyn and Richard. With nothing but geniality, pleasantries, and silence, he paints a terrifying picture of two people who wake up one day and find they have nothing in common.

With careful prose and lingering pace, The Forgotten Condition of Things shows how the borders between people can be a knife edge slicing them apart. Just as in a psych ward, people everywhere exist compartmentalized from one another. Perhaps in Sophie, though, Evelyn has found a frayed edge. An entry point where one can cross over. A line that blurs people together.

Josh Rogers can be reached at jrogers@phx.com.