Book currents: various people, interrupted.(two books)(Brief Article)

If the well-brought-up mental patients at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts, did not arrive suffering from folie de grandeur -- one woman wandered the Olmsted-designed grounds dressed as a lady in a Thomas Gainsborough portrait -- there was always the chance that association with the other guests might induce it. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ray Charles, James Taylor, and John Nash (the mathematician whose life story is told in "A Beautiful Mind," a book by Sylvia Nasar and now a Ron Howard film) all spent time on the wards. McLean in its prime, the subject of Alex Beam's GRACEFULLY INSANE (PublicAffairs), was a place where rich families consigned their inconveniently strange relatives to lives of drinking Lapsang souchong, playing croquet, and trying treatments that sound like the offerings of a day spa: some melancholics ...