The Reconstructionist by Josephine Hart
This book review is going to be a little bit different, because I wanted to answer the question: What was it that made it a keeper and a reread for me?
The first time I read this book, I was amazed. But I was also poor, having just graduated college. I got it at the library in Los Angeles. At that point in my life, I wasn’t really buying books. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. When I finally had the money to purchase it, I couldn’t.
I looked in every bookstore I visited for a period of five years. But it didn’t exist anywhere; I’m guessing due to the writer passing away and the rights being in limbo. But I kept looking and searching. Then, magically one day, I found it in a bookstore, and I pounced on it like a cat on a tasty treat.
I decided to reread this book as part of my TBT book review series, because it is one of the books I remembered so strongly I had to own it. But I hadn’t read it in a few years. And so, I did. And when I finished, I wondered – why do I like this book so much?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s well-written, interesting and engaging. But it features several chapters of the main character, Jack Harrington, a psychiatrist, listening to his patients. It’s not about Jack in these moments at all, but instead a study of the characters he treats. And yet it is about Jack and the main theme of the book – reconstructing ourselves, our memories, our experiences.
Digging in deeper, I realized that I love this book because you don’t know what connects Jack with his sister Kate, until the very end of the book. The book meanders through Jack’s thoughts, his past, his patients, his very odd relationship with his sister, until the past calls and he has to face it.
He travels to Ireland, the place where he lived until he was fourteen, Kate is eight and a half, and a family tragedy abruptly changed his life forever. This occurs midway through the book, so you at least know why the two siblings are so bound, but you don’t see the whole truth of it until the very end. The tie that binds them both and also occasionally pulls them both under as well.
The writing is vague and mysterious, which I also like – the allusion to something more that is never said out loud. You see their connection; you see that it is odd and deeper than most people in the book think it should be. You know there is a reason, but you don’t know what that is until the end.
There are multiple layers in this book. Jack is so absorbed on fixing others – his patients, his sister – that he never faces his own problems, to the detriment of his now defunct marriage. There are layers upon layers here, not just in the character but also in how the story is presented. We see his thoughts and narrative, the tragedies his patients face that are reflected in small ways in his own tragedy, the fragility of his sister and the strength of them both.
I think, though, what speaks most to me in this book is the reconstruction we all do on our lives and on our memories. Sometimes we do it to make it bearable; sometimes to ease our own guilt; and sometimes to create more happiness in the memory than we are currently feeling in our lives. It amplifies the nostalgia we already amplify through the connection of memory, emotions, smells, sights and sounds.
It allows us to rebuild the past memory – whether traumatic or joyful – into something tangible, something we can manage, something that doesn’t make us uncomfortable or something that takes the uncomfortable away. And that’s the power of the book for me.
And it ends on hope. Hope that we too can get past our prior trauma and swim to the surface.
There’s a reason I want my last tattoo to be of a water lily. They grow from the dark depths of ponds, from the muck that surrounds them, and shoot up into the sunlight on the surface of the water. Much like me in a way…and Jack Harrington.
About the Author
Josephine Hart was born and educated in Ireland. She was a director of Haymarket Publishing, in London, before going on to produce a number of West End plays, including The House of Bernarda Alba by Frederico Garcia Lorea, The Vortex by Noel Coward, and The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch. She was married to Maurice Saatchi and had two sons. She was the author of Damage. Hart died, aged 69, of ovarian cancer in June 2011.
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Originally published in Feedium.