A PANORAMIC TOUR OF THE NORTHAMPTON STATE HOSPITAL
By Mark Roessler
Levellers Press
markroessler.com
The former Northampton State Hospital was long a landmark in the city. Built in 1858, and known at that time as the Northampton Asylum for the Insane, the hospital was considered a cutting edge medical center in that era, set on a bucolic hilltop where patients could work on a hospital-run farm as part of their treatment.
But the buildings fell into disrepair in the 20th century, just as the idea of warehousing mentally ill people also came to be seen as archaic and cruel; by the early 2000s, the original hospital had become a haunted wreck, and it has since been torn down and turned into a housing development.
But before that happened, Northampton photographer, graphic designer and writer Mark Roessler spent time, from 1999 to 2003, documenting the derelict hospital and grounds with his camera. He’s now put that work together in an extended photo essay, “A Panoramic Tour of the Northampton State Hospital.”
It’s a somewhat spooky portrait, as Roessler, a former managing editor at The Valley Advocate, tours the once overgrown fields and woods outside “Old Main,” where nature had been steadily enveloping the building’s exterior and the crumbling pavement outside it.
Inside one hospital wing, wide-angle and overhead photos capture chipped floors and walls, broken windows and piles of debris; graffiti and a complete absence of any furniture or other furnishings speak of a place that’s long been abandoned. Roessler provides a helpful guide, via an aerial photo of the hospital, to the places he’s photographed — a vivid portrait of a vanished chapter from local history.
GONE SO LONG
By Andre Dubus III
W. W. Norton & Company
Andre Dubus III has won literary acclaim for writing about people struggling with loss, anger, working-class blues and unrealized dreams. His portrait of a clash between a broken white woman and a former Iranian colonel, now doing menial labor in the U.S., in “House of Sand and Fog” made the 1999 novel a National Book Award finalist. And in his 2011 memoir, “Townie,” Dubus retraced his own volatile roots growing up in gritty towns north of Boston.
In his latest novel, “Gone So Long,” Dubus, who teaches English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, revisits the Bay State in a story about a long-ago episode of family violence that’s left anger, depression and guilt in its wake — something one of the story’s main characters, Daniel Ahearn, is trying to amend in his final years.
Told partly through flashbacks, “Gone So Long” offers a portrait of an aged Daniel, who lives quietly in a trailer on the seaside north of Boston. But 40 years earlier, Daniel was a jealous young man who stabbed his wife, Linda, to death in a fit of rage, which sent him to prison for years. His 3-year-old daughter, Susan, was then raised by Linda’s mother, Lois, who took the girl to Florida.
Stricken with cancer, Daniel decides he must see Susan for the first time in decades; he writes her a letter and heads south. His plan sparks fury and fear in Lois, now in her 80s, whose bitterness at her former son-in-law hasn’t abated.
“She would be damned if she allowed Ahearn to breathe the same air,” Dubus writes. Lois now packs a handgun, too.
And Susan, in her early 40s, is adrift as well. Not sure she loves her husband, she’s a college writing teacher who’s given up on her novel and is trying to write a memoir, and she struggles with depression, self-doubt and alienation as she’s forced to try to recall her childhood trauma.
As father and daughter move inexorably to their meeting, tension rises, but the depth of the characters is what keeps the story moving forward, Publishers Weekly writes. “Perhaps most impressive is how Dubus elicits sympathy in the reader for Danny, whose life effectively ended the moment he picked up the knife. This is a compassionate and wonderful novel.”