2022 book #46. 2022. A young artist/writer recounts his lifelong battle with depression which was finally cured by a dose of psychedelic mushrooms. Told in flashbacks as he tries to get his life in order. Pretty interesting. Fiction. ( )

At its core, this is a book about books and writing. Brewer’s heavy reliance on book references suggests that he is a widely read and scholarly writer. A partial list of citations includes Sebald, Pollan, Herr, di Lampedusa, Dyer, Rovelli, and Johnson. What could these diverse authors possibly have in common? Well, Brewer sets out to show us and often succeeds yet sometimes just seems to lose his way.

His unnamed narrator is a 30-ish writer who comes to his craft by accident following a failed career as a painter. He wrote a successful book of short stories almost off the cuff. He feels his success was a fluke and undeserved, leaving him with a persistent case of imposter syndrome. Couple this to a 20-year battle with severe depression and one gets a dark picture of self-loathing bordering on the suicidal. Brewer’s depiction of depression is so compelling and persistent as to suggest he has intimate personal knowledge of the illness. He congers the overworked but apt metaphor of a “mist” that descends over him consuming his entire identity— “…gloom was the original force that made up whoever I was.”

The action occurs during a one-day round-trip between Rome and Bologna on Italy’s high-speed train, the Frecciarossa (the red arrow). Brewer uses abundant flashbacks to flesh out his narrative. The writer is ghosting a memoir for an eminent physicist, who has recently disappeared. The train trip is to search for him at his family estate in Modena. It turns out that the writer took a generous advance to write a novel about his childhood experience with a deadly chemical spill that consumed his boyhood hometown in West Virginia. He spent all the money on a lavish wedding and an Italian honeymoon but produced no novel. This memoir is his publishers’ dubious attempt to recover the money he owes them. The writer eventually solves the mystery of the disappeared physicist, but that is decidedly underwhelming.

During the trip, the writer’s ruminations range widely, giving the narrative an unfocussed feel. His experience with depression and its miracle cure using psilocybin is never far from his thoughts. But he also cogitates on physical theories of space and time, the nature of creativity, his strained marriage, his writing career and mentorship by a famous author, and his West Virginia childhood. Regrettably, Brewer’s inability to edit gives his novel a muddled feel. Notwithstanding this, there’s a lot to like in this book. The writing is often quite lyrical, the ideas are smart and timely, the insider’s view of the publishing game is revealing, and of course, the depiction of crippling depression is indeed insightful. For me, the high point was Brewer’s story of his crazy father’s CD collection. He treats this with humor and compassion. One only wishes he had developed it more. Maybe he will in the future. The low point was his miraculous and totally implausible cure from life-long depression with one psychedelic trip. The idea behind such things is intriguing and promising but Brewer seems to oversell it. ( )

When a once-promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous physicist’s memoir, his life is already starting to crack, weighed down by debt, marital issues, and depression he exaggerates his abilities knowing that every portion of the memoir he writes repairs his own life a little bit more. So what happens when partway through the project,: the physicist vanishes, leaving him with only a fraction of the information he needs to finish the job?

With everything, including his sanity is in jeopardy, he undergoes an experimental, psychedelic treatment and finds his world completely transformed.. With incredible imagination and expertly formed sequences, Brewer paints a bold and beautiful picture of a person on the edge, zig-zagging through art, memory, and the ways our lives intertwine and align within the riddles of space and time, and. exploring the depth of the human spirit.

The Red Arrow is in a category all its own and is easily the best mind-bending, compulsively readable story to hit shelves in a long time.

A big thank you to negalley and publishers for providing an advanced e-copy for me to read and give my honest opinions on the experience that is The Red Arrow. ( )