'My Brother's Madness' insightful, hopeful

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May 8, 2008

By JERRY McGOVERN The Press Republican Thu May 08, 2008, 12:37 PM EDT

When they're both well past middle age, Claude Pines says to his brother, Paul, "I hope I haven't been too much of a burden."

"I might say the same," Paul says.

This balancing of brotherly love and brotherly burdens is what "My Brother's Madness -- A Memoir," by Glens Falls resident Paul Pines, is about.

Their story begins in Brooklyn and ends in upstate New York. In his life, Paul Pines was a merchant seaman, a taxi driver, a bartender, the proprietor of a jazz club and a writing teacher at Adirondack Community College.

Now he's a psychotherapist and also the host of Lake George's annual jazz weekend.

While Paul takes a winding path to career stability and a healthy relationship with his wife and daughter, Claude struggles always and everywhere. He has a breakdown while studying at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which ends his dreams of being a doctor like his father. In his 40s, he has a profound psychotic break and is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Eventually, Claude, too, lives in Glens Falls. Sometimes, he depends on his brother, Paul, for care, sometimes he resents Paul's efforts. For his part, Paul is frustrated by Claude's needs and guilt-ridden if he does not respond.

Together, they replicate a family dynamic familiar to many of us. As caregivers, we vacillate between wanting to care for a relative and wishing he or she was not such a burden. As the one in need, we want and appreciate the other's help but might resent his or her strength and our dependence.

Pines does a wonderful job of capturing this ambivalence, the patience/exasperation that surrounds so many relationships. And he explores -- by telling his life story, his brother's life story and their overlapping story -- the stresses peculiar to siblings.

What one owes one's children and parents is usually far clearer than one's responsibility to a brother or sister. While Pines offers no advice about caring for a sibling, his story provides examples of efforts that worked and those that didn't.

As frustrated as Pines gets, he doesn't blame Claude or anyone else for Claude's illness. Though he gets irritated and tired, he's too smart to come to facile conclusions about the conditions that trouble him and his brother.

In that freedom from blame, he reminds us of another famous memoir about mental illness, Mark Vonnegut's 1975 "Eden Express." In that book, he describes his experiences with schizophrenia.

"A more serious problem with most psychological theories and therapies is that they usually involve placing blame," writes the son of famed novelist Kurt Vonngegut. "According to their model, your parents or your friends or you, yourself, or someone else has screwed up. The fact is, there is no blame. You haven't done anything horribly wrong and neither have your parents or anyone else."

Predictably, this is not an easy read. There is no saccharine "He's not heavy, he's my brother" message filling the pages. Instead, it's filled with the sadness of two brothers. Pines had concerns before he began writing, and one of those was whether Claude had any objections.

Claude says, "What do I have to hide "¦ or lose?"

"It could be painful," Paul tells him.

And surely, it was for them, and is also, often, for the reader -- but the book is definitely worth reading. Pines is an accomplished writer, having published novels and books of poetry. His skill makes "My Brother's Madness" engrossing, insightful, and, finally, hopeful.