Port Mungo

Rating:
Summary: Port Bungle
Review: McGrath's overbaked novel is long on intense psychological scrutiny and short on artistic authenticity, or character development. This is surprising, considering the author's reputation for fleshing out fictional figures. But much of this novel is plain fatuous, unsure and uninformed about the true lives of painters and the art they make. McGrath is unable to at all communicate much about the paintings that his various characters supposedly live through--a large error in such a work in which the comprehension of the players is insistently said to exist in their art. This gambit falls flat. For a book with such alluring locations as post-war London, Abstract Expressionist New York in the 1950s and 60s, and a far-flung tropical port, there is a disappointing and ultimately lazy lack of local color, atmosphere, and description, in favor of endless musings about characters, and their self-importance, characters who grow less likable and compelling page after page. Forget the plot. The ending is an attempt at the dramatic macabre but is plain ridiculous and unbelievable--it inspires giggles not chills. Worse--in one of the few actual artistic references the author cites Manet instead of Monet--a freshman art history error. Enough. Leave Port Mungo and its simmering simplicities alone. I took it to Bermuda on the recommendation of esteemed critics in London's Observer on Sunday, and ended up throwing it out the window. Should have stuck with Iris Murdoch...

Rating:
Summary: A Creepy Gothic
Review: Patrick McGrath is a master of the gothic novel. One of the main characters in this novel is that of Vera who is an adultress and a drunkard as well. She is married to Jack, a virtuous artist. Port Mungo is a novel about child abuse, drunkeness, adultery, incest and drug addiction. As with any great gothic novel, Port Mungo revels in its sheer creepiness and may well be the best new gothic of the year.

Rating:
Summary: A sensitive portrait of a tortured artist
Review: The artistic temperament and love's journey is at the heart of this eloquently written novel from Patrick McGrath. I must confess that unlike some of the other reviewers, I have not read any of McGrath's "gothic" novels, so I came to Port Mungo with a willingness to experience something totally new. Port Mungo is a dark, somber story that deals with the shifting web of dysfunctional family turbulence and deception. A portrait of the painter, Jack Rathbone is at the heart of this story - an ambiguous, tortured, complex, and multi-faceted hero.

The story is told in the first person by Jack's loyal sister, Gin, who not only offers her opinions on Jack's wayward ways and his relationship with fellow artist Vera Savage, but views much of the action through hearsay and conversations that she has with Jack later in life. Vera, a rough-hewn, man-chasing alcoholic from Glasgow tempts Jack, just seventeen but already fired with ambition, to flee the suffocating confines of London for the broader canvas of New York. Disappointed by the ''phonies and losers'' they encounter in the Lower Manhattan of the 1950's, they travel farther south, first to pre-Revolutionary Havana and then to Pelican Road, Port Mungo, in search of artistic enlightenment where they can shed their civilized selves and plug into a more primal source of energy.

In seedy Port Mungo, painting in a ''wreck of a house that lurched precariously over the river,'' Jack finds what he's after and Vera gives up painting for more drink and shabby affairs. Their daughter Peg, neglected by Vera, is left to her own ends and becomes wayward, "primitive" and almost uncontrollable - becoming a smoker at seven years old and a drinker at eight. When Peg drowns in strange circumstances at the age of sixteen and her body is found floating face up among the mangroves, both Jack and Vera embark on a life of blame and soul searching.

When Anna, a second daughter appears twenty years later, and demands to know what happened, the mystery of Peg's death, and the dysfunctional relationship that Jack and Vera had with Peg is gradually revealed. Vera has her own take on what happened among the mangroves and we finally learn the truth that Jack is a ''third-rate artist'' who fled to Port Mungo because he was ''scared to show his stuff where it mattered.'' And we learn, too, her devastating alternative explanation of the image that haunts Jack's mature work - ''a drowned girl gazing up at him from a tangle of underwater roots.''

Port Mungo has a shifting, mellifluous narrative that is, at once, confusing and beguiling. McGrath is more concerned with understanding artistic truth and psychological truth, than just giving an undemanding and unchallenging account of one family's problems. Gin remains the psychological center of the novel, and when she complains to her former lover, the sculptor Eduardo Byrne that Vera and Jack don't really love each other but instead suffer from a shared pathology. Eduardo responds, with ''that's just love." Port Mungo is a tight and tautly composed novel that provides a solemn deliberation and says some interesting things about the indistinguishable themes of art and love. Mike Leonard July 04.