Spoilers: Kit Crumpton's book The Fading of Kimberly works as an interesting look at mental health treatment in the early 20th century. It gives the Reader a strong sense of the world of psychiatric hospitals in which the slightly oddest behavior could have someone share the same hospital as a sadistic killer. A world where psychiatrists are not as fond of treating the mentally ill as they are of shocking them or cutting them open.
Unfortunately The Fading of Kimberly is marred by uneven writing in which character's motivations are unclear and plot threads are left dangling. These glaring flaws keep this from being a perfect book instead it is a good one which needs some tweaking.
Kimberly Weatherspoon is the spoiled pampered only daughter of Warren Weatgerspoon, a wealthy widower. She is a perfect example of someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She is overly concerned with her appearance and receiving attention from others. Kimberly arranges parties and other events so she can be the center of attention. She also seeks romance from the most handsome and wealthiest men so they can laud praise and bestow gifts to her.
With that narcissism also comes an immaturity suggesting Borderline Personality Disorder. Kimberly has a hard time living with rejection as her fiancé, Edwin, learns the hard way. She catches him in an embrace with her father's secretary, Laverne, and shoots them both dead. The subsequent verdict has her declared guilty but her father's connections manage to have her declared legally insane and she is committed to a sanitarium.
Unfortunately, she is not alone during her time in Elgin State Hospital. Among the other patients is one Riley Nacht, a former astronomer with a connection to Kimberly. When Kimberly attended boarding school, Riley taught a session on star gazing to her class. During a field trip, Riley got a moment alone with Dorothy, one of Kimberly's classmates and murdered the young girl. Like Kimberly he too was declared legally insane and institutionalized.
The book is effective in describing people with mental illness and psychiatric disorders and the treatment towards them which pretty much amounted to little to no treatment at all. One thing the book shows is how difficult it is for people to live with such disorders and how difficult it is for the people around them. Kimberly is extremely self-involved to the point of being irritating to the other characters and the Reader, it is only until later that we learn that she had a childhood with a father who adored her but preferred to throw money and possessions at her rather than commit to any real parenting.
Kimberly grew with a strong sense of entitlement and very little self-control. This is shown prominently during her school years when she bribes classmates with gifts in lieu of friendships and is unable to form real attachments with them. Even after Dorothy is murdered and Kimberly is an eyewitness to the crime, she blocks out the murder and retreats further into herself and her own little world as if avoiding acknowledging the murder itself.
Kimberly's narcissism makes her a difficult person to live with as her engagement to Edwin shows. Edwin is certainly a fortune hunter that when Warren bribes him with money to leave his little girl and run, Edwin does not have much internal struggle as he goes for the long green and runs. However, Kimberly's demands and constant craves for attention wears on him, as well as her lack of concern about anything that isn't about her.
Kimberly's time in the Elvin State Hospital is the most interesting part as we are shown various treatments like cold bath and shock therapy that harm more than cure.
There are also psychologists who use guess work in diagnosing patients such as giving ones like Riley free reign to see how he works. This proves to be a big problem as one of the orderlies, himself troubled, befriends Riley to the point where he uses his advice to molest female patients in their sleep. One character is given a lobotomy and is heartbreakingly reduced to a shell of their former self.
Crumpton clearly knows a lot about the early years of the mental health profession since she researched it for a non-fiction book, The Fading of Lloyd about her great uncle who died in a psychiatric hospital. But her fiction writing needs work.
The opening in which it is suggested that Kimberly might be the reincarnation of Anne Boleyn is interesting but out of place in a book that doesn't deal with the supernatural in the rest of the book. It is out of place and is more filler than anything else.
While Kimberly's back story helps us understand her, its placement in the middle of the book is a detriment. The Reader is subjected to several chapters of her acting spoiled and irritating so that by the time they learn about why she is the way she is, they may not care. It would be better to tell the story chronologically to give us the girl before the narcissist.
There are some odd things towards the end. The final moments between Riley, his orderly, and Kimberly is anticlimactic and involves circumstances that don't even directly involve them. Some revelations between Warren and his butler are thrown in at the last minute that should have been revealed earlier (and certainly would have spared this Reader from thinking entirely different.)
As a book about mental health, The Fading of Kimberly stands out. As a novel, it kind of fades away.
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