A review by James McCarty Yeager

Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family's Schizophrenia, by Patrick Tracey, Bantam Books, $24.00, ISBN 978-0-55380525-3

WASHINGTON DC: Schizophrenia blighted Boston Irishman Patrick Tracey’s teens and twenties by attacking two of his older sisters in their heyday. It was but the latest blast of lightning from a gods-roiled sky that had taken his uncle, his grandmother, and his great-great-great grandmother with the same disease. In his exactingly honest memoir-and-investigation, Stalking Irish Madness, Tracey tries to find out the whys and hows and what-ifs of this shocking intrusion into his family.

But no matter where he goes he keeps bumping his nose into the sad and immutable litany of truth about schizophrenia:
· it is incurable and irreversible, characterized by “hearing voices”;
· it is devastating to its victims and their families;
· there is no useful treatment other than institutionalization itself;
· it seems to come from a cluster of causes that no one has yet fully elucidated;
· medical research seems hopelessly playing catch-up;
· yet having schizophrenics talk to one another in groups apparently helps blunt the plague of voices in their heads.

Scratch an Irishman, find a poet. The wandering poet is classically in quest of love, or truth, or a sight of the gods. In this case he is disguised as an American journalist in search of some relief for the pain of separation he felt with his sisters, Chelle and Austine, when – in his and their teens twenty years ago – they suddenly leaped, one after another, beyond the boundaries of normal life. He writes of their difference, as painful as their similarities, in the aftermath: "Chelle's voices are friend and foe; Austine's are all bad actors."

Tracey uses his investigatory skills to explore mythology, the tales of faery, genealogy, archaeology, genetics and the records of the Commissioners in Lunacy for Ireland. While relating stages on his own expedition toward remission of his alcoholism and addiction, he takes you deep into his psyche with haunting sincerity -- and then out the other side in jaunty rhetorical flourishes.

We follow him from Boston to Providence RI, then to Washington DC and London. A year ago he acquired a caravan and camped that summer in deepest, rainy Roscommon, the West of Ireland home of his elusive Egan ancestors and site of a massive 19th century insane asylum still in use today. He explored Dublin as well, and met one of the principal schizophrenia researchers whose genetic discoveries ultimately relied on data from of all places, Roscommon.

The relationship among the factors of late fatherhood (past 50), alcoholism, and maternal starvation is found to be significant for schizophrenia, less so for just plain being Irish. Turns out the Irish are no more frequently nuts than any other peoples, propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. Yet schizophrenia, moreso than other forms of mental illness, seems to bring about shame and an unwillingness to discuss, especially with a stranger from Amurrikay, the poignant private deprivations the disease has wrought on Irish families.

Tracey's ability to get people to talk to him is enhanced by his knowledge of when to hold back, when not to mention schizophrenia at all so as not to scare off the proper and reticent Irish. His encounters with tramps, farmers, fellow campers of various social strata, landlords, pubgoers and scholars are finely calibrated to reveal more of interviewee than interviewer.

Beginning with an overture of major themes, Tracey starts at the Cave of the Cat in the center of Ireland and ends up at the Well of the Naked Madmen in a Kerry peninsula, as his late mother had foretold. He weaves science with memory, speculation with observation, and leavens persistent fear with dogged curiosity. Although he arrives at no startling conclusions, his mapping of the edges of the unknown is a sufficient labor to make the journey fruitful.

Tracey writes with a mixture of passion and objectivity, involvement and distance. It isn’t so much that he has a command of how to turn phrases as of how to explicate clearly. His method is to provide one more simile to ensnare you, one more aside to beguile.

Auden said of Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” That sense of the relationship between sadness and creativity never leaves Tracey. However, he never grows maudlin about it either. In all, Stalking Irish Madness is a far greater achievement than it has any right to be. It could have been an overlong magazine article, but instead it has structure, resonance and significance neatly expressed. Schizophrenia itself may remain a hopeless curse upon its victims, but Tracey guides you to a place of acceptance that is beyond begrudgement. He has taken really unprepossessing material and made something useful of it, an achievement many a poet might envy.

--James McCarty Yeager is an occasional Washington columnist for the Progressive Populist, a nationwide biweekly tabloid published in Storm Lake IA and available online at www.populist.com.