“The Mind Reels” is Fredrik deBoer’s first novel — and, to some extent, it reads that way. A Substack pundit and cultural critic who has already published two works of left-leaning intellectual nonfiction, deBoer turns from mass-market academic writing to fiction in his latest work, but he uses his novel’s narrative format to accomplish what is essentially an essay.
“The Mind Reels” follows prototypical suburban girl Alice as she leaves her small town for a big college — in this case, the University of Oklahoma. DeBoer’s first few chapters are his strongest. We inhabit Alice’s mind as she experiences the franticness of college life: the two-facedness of the people she meets and the beginning of her struggles with eating, work, romance and friends.
Alice’s mental health nosedives as she develops what we will later discover is bipolar disorder. It’s here where deBoer loses control. It is impressive how well we inhabit Alice’s mind — a trickier feat to pull off the more she becomes divorced from reality — but deBoer undercuts his own character by refusing to allow the reader to become close to her as a person and not just a mental health patient. Each chapter portrays a moment of crisis in her several-years-long spiral, and we don’t get the chance to see a non-crisis Alice long enough to root for her. Worse, deBoer seems to stop caring about her, too, as Alice becomes simply a means for him to describe lengthy episodes of paranoia, mania, depression and hallucination or the inside of a psychiatric hospital. The sliver of complexity she had at the beginning of the novel blips out.
“The Mind Reels” follows Alice through college and into her 30s, her personality and mental illnesses increasingly tempered by drug cocktails as she ages. She has trouble finding a job, getting up, going to sleep, feeling motivated, reading, concentrating, loving and caring — and, once again, we start to have trouble caring, too. By the end of the book, Alice is staring down the barrel of another relapse and presents herself with a choice between resuming her medication or overdosing on painkillers. DeBoer doesn’t tell us which pills she takes. Although this is an interesting set-up on paper, by this point, the big climactic moment is void of emotional tension. “The Mind Reels” has sputtered into a repetitive and predictable cycle: Alice barely surviving, spinning out into relapse and blowing up her life and relationships in the process. You can see the next spin coming by the time the last one ends. “The Mind Reels” is both too rushed and a slog, unable to develop Alice or to stop itself from hashing out her struggle over and over again.
If you are looking for an engaging depiction of mental illness and a lucid portrayal of someone living a heavily medicated life, “The Mind Reels” can offer you quite a lot. DeBoer himself lives with bipolar disorder, and it’s hard to imagine his personal experience hasn’t had an impact on the sections of the book that feel most real. In line with deBoer’s pundit background, it’s damning to the United States’ mental health system and eye-opening for someone like me who has never experienced the grips of paranoia or clinical depression. The book feels like a nonfiction testimonial disguised as a novel. But as literature, it’s just alright.
DeBoer loses control of his metaphors and never really gets on top of his own pace. His characters are underdeveloped because he undervalues them. The more I tried to connect with this book, the more deBoer reminded me that it was simply a vehicle for portraying a concept he’s interested in, and that he would always allow narrative complexity to fall by the wayside in pursuit of this. “The Mind Reels” isn’t meant to be compelling fiction — it’s a portrait of sickness from an author experienced in portraying reality. And, in that sense, it succeeds.
Daily Arts Contributor Elias Simon can be reached elmsimon@umich.edu.
