And Give You Peace (2014) by Jessica Treadway

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

And Give You Peace (2014)

by Jessica Treadway

Ashmont, New York

New York: 20/105

Upstate New York: 19/23

    Ashmont is very close to Albany New York- the last major non NYC metropole in New York state.  And Give You Peace is the first book from this metro, the other is Ironweed by William Kennedy.  This book is about an OCD father who murders himself and his 16 year old daughter, leaving his two older daughters and separated-but-not-divorced wife to pick up the pieces.  While I admire editor Susan Straight's impulse to include the mentally ill in her literary picture of America, once again I found myself reading a novel where the mentally ill character commits a horrific crime (murder/suicide) that seems ridiculously out of character.

   Now, in addition to having mental illness run in my family, and having been in a past relationship with a person who was diagnosed with OCD as an adult, I've been working as  a criminal defense attorney in state and federal court for over 20 years.  I have never ever heard of a murder attributed to OCD, let alone a horrific murder-suicide.  I'm not saying such a thing never happens, but I've never heard of it.   I found the entire idea that his character could woo the wife character and have three kids, and raise three kids to the point where the youngest was 16 only to finally "snap"- preposterous.  And not in a suspension of disbelief kind of way.

   In my experience OCD manifests in a very specific way: The obsession triggers a certain kind of behavior.  Both the obsession and the behavior it induces are repetitive.  OCD does not, in my experience, trigger a sufferer to shoot his teenage daughter in the head because he saw her necking with a neighbor boy in the treehouse.   Someone suffering from OCD might very well harm themselves in a number of ways- most often by the nature of the repetitive behavior as a form of self harm- scratching, cutting, etc.

   This novel was published by Greywolf Press in 2014.  Was there really an editor there who read this manuscript and said, "Yes!"  There was, of course, but man, I just did not buy it one bit.