Great day coming

Politics, love, and the terrible fragility of the human mind are at the heart of Hope Hale Davis's remarkable memoir of Washington D.C. during the first exciting years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Davis was a new mother, on her own and breathless with ideals when she met the brilliant young economist Hermann Brunck. In quick succession they fell in love, married, and secretly joined the American Communist Party. As underground members their job was to infiltrate high policy-making levels of the government, but Party dictates and the strain of secret work helped push Brunck toward a mental collapse. For a time Davis thought she could explain away Brunck's delusions, show him where he had gone wrong, and somehow put their close and happy life back together. But when it grew obvious something much more was needed, Davis sought help for Brunck in a sanitarium where he was treated by the Freudian analyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a well-known figure in the early days of psychoanalysis, later the heroine (under another name) of Joanna Greenberg's celebrated novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Against a backdrop of Communist activity in Washington, with glimpses of the Party's secret work in Britain and Spain, Hope Hale Davis has written a gripping account of her impassioned fight for Brunck's recovery - against Fromm-Reichmann for control of his treatment, against Brunck's failing hold on love and sanity, and against her own doubts and loneliness. Like few other books, Great Day Coming recaptures with perfect pitch the doubts and sorrows of the 1930s.