Texas author Stefan Merrill Block explores the space between fact and history, memory and truth in his second novel, The Storm at the Door.  The fact is that Block’s grandfather, Frederick Merrill, was sent to an insane asylum in the early 1960s. The history, passed down through generations, is that Block’s grandmother, Katharine Mead Merrill, sent Frederick there and was forced to raise their four young daughters on her own. The memories are sparse and varied, and the truth, well, the truth may be what Block’s fictionalized account approaches.

The novel is part biography and part fiction, with Block himself appearing as narrator during the biographical passages. In one such passage, Block introduces Katharine at Echo Cottage, the family’s summer home, over twenty years after her choice to send Frederick to Mayflower (based on the famous McLean mental hospital outside of Boston). From the beginning, Block acknowledges how little he actually knows about his grandparents’ lives. About Katharine, Block wonders, “What do I know of her? That she was so often in that chair. That in the afternoons, she often slept. That, one afternoon, in the summer of 1989, she woke from a nap to make the vexing decision that she made.”

The decision she makes is to burn pages of “strange and beautiful and desperate words” that Frederick wrote during his stay in Mayflower, pages that provide the family’s only chance of understanding what Frederick experienced while institutionalized.

Ever aware of the gaps in his own family history, Block creates characters for Katharine and Frederick. Having met only months before Frederick left for WWII, the two marry shortly after his return, despite disturbing changes Katharine notices in his behavior.  Thus begins the presentation of the two Fredericks, one with “his limitless charms, his canny metaphors, his poignant humor, his astonishing range of intellect and wit,” and another, “this other Frederick, who navigated the world with a left hand’s crude and fumbling attempt to imitate the right hand’s dexterity.”

Through Frederick’s multiple bouts with depression and dips into the “darkness” of his personality, Katharine attempts to believe that “this was not really Frederick . . . but through love and care, as Frederick had written her, she could restore the Real.”

And for years Katharine does continue to try to restore “the Real,” until one night when Frederick, drunk and stumbling, exposes himself to two older women on the side of a highway. As an alternative to jail, Katharine relents to her family’s wishes and sends Frederick to Mayflower, a decision that will torment her.

Frederick, imprisoned within the walls of Mayflower, kept within the confines of the Miltowns (his medication) and their “warm, clam front pushing away the bracing bluster of his mind,” must navigate the darkness of his own mind and of the asylum itself in order to be free. He shares a ward with a fictionalized Robert Lowell, a Jewish professor who believes that he has discovered the true language between all men and things, and a famous schizophrenic with upwards of 14 unique personalities, including one loosely based on Carmen Miranda. Frederick’s mental state is never clearly defined, never clearly sane or insane, and Block questions the distinctions between “normal” and “crazy.”

As Frederick struggles to prove his sanity, Katharine struggles to cope with her decision and to raise her four daughters (one of whom is Block’s mother). At a loss for friends and money, Katharine feels that she “can no long be anything other than what everyone plainly sees her to be.”

Perhaps due to the personal nature of the subject matter, The Storm at the Door is at times overly sentimental, most notably when Block appears as narrator and grapples with his own similarities to his troubled grandfather. Fortunately, these moments of sentimentality rarely extend into the more fictionalized portions of the novel, where Block describes emotions and events with an impressive degree of finesse and subtlety.

Throughout the novel, Block offers characters that are simultaneously flawed and endearing and a plot that encompasses a multitude of events with unique precision. Block seamlessly glides through generations as he attempts to understand his history, his family, and, ultimately, his grandfather, a man whose mysterious life has become akin to legend.