The latest avant-garde literary trend

Freddie DeBoer’s debut novel, The Mind Reels, is about a girl, Alice, who slowly goes crazy, gets medicated, goes crazy again, gets medicated again, etc.

This girl is an everywoman. The book is very careful to situate her as being slightly above-average in every possible quality (looks, intelligence, popularity). And it’s careful to tell us that her childhood, too, was happy, but not exceptional.

Alice was never popular in high school, but she was kind and that kindness was rewarded by her peers, who treated her as someone who stood outside of the hierarchy, who lived to putter around the people who mattered and be her own kind self, and they rewarded her with compliments of her plain clothes and features, invitations to parties, rides home from football games. There was a part of her that knew she was being condescended to but she didn’t care.

Like Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, this is not a book about a person, it’s a book about a type.

And, like Perfection, it’s written in a very clean style. No particular sentence calls attention to itself. The aim isn’t to impress you, the aim is to tell a story.

You’re powered through the story by a simple question: “Is she going to be okay?”

I haven’t read enough stories about madness to know what usually happens in this type of tale. Last year, I read a novel, Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street, that’s also about a bipolar woman. In that case, the story ends upon an ambiguous note. The woman recovers, but you know that the madness will come again someday soon.

In this case, I’d actually read a review of The Mind Reels, by T. Benjamin White, that spoiled the ending, but I’d forgotten what he’d written! So I was running blind.

Because I follow DeBoer online, I’d heard a fair amount about the aims of this novel. I knew his intent was to avoid glamorizing mental illness—to show how dull and painful it could be. His description didn’t necessarily make me want to read the book (although I preordered it, just to support him), because I like glamorous things. Elaine Kraf’s book definitely glamorized insanity, and that’s part of why I liked it. There’s a beauty that hangs over insanity: a beauty that comes from floating down 72nd street, feeling like everything on this block belongs ...