{"id":3866,"date":"2025-11-28T12:49:04","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T12:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/11\/28\/the-mind-reels-is-a-good-essay-and-an-alright-book\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T12:49:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T12:49:10","slug":"the-mind-reels-is-a-good-essay-and-an-alright-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/11\/28\/the-mind-reels-is-a-good-essay-and-an-alright-book\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Mind Reels\u2019 is a good essay and an alright book"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>\u201cThe Mind Reels\u201d is Fredrik deBoer\u2019s first novel \u2014 and, to some extent, it reads that way. A <a href=\"https:\/\/freddiedeboer.substack.com\/\">Substack pundit and cultural critic<\/a> who has already published two works of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/09\/24\/books\/review\/how-elites-ate-the-social-justice-movement-fredrik-deboer-the-identity-trap-yascha-mounk.html\">left-leaning<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/the-cult-of-smart-review-social-justice-goes-to-school-11597792293?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=AWEtsqcRWNFE9SkvLY5yMv0MLGXHLbYSJLdsf-dXorhTyR8yG_5P1lm_DYZPr5XPNKI%3D&amp;gaa_ts=691f6e0b&amp;gaa_sig=9NcIty71qQxqeXQwa6EWPacA6YgNx4EgfuV5Xy8EOkQsrUIetaYQ0Ktz38YMG3m2x1tJZ2QOI0G3FlvPRC0GCg%3D%3D\">intellectual nonfiction<\/a>, deBoer turns from mass-market academic writing to fiction in his latest work, but he uses his novel\u2019s narrative format to accomplish what is essentially an essay.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Mind Reels\u201d follows prototypical suburban girl Alice as she leaves her small town for a big college \u2014 in this case, the University of Oklahoma. DeBoer\u2019s first few chapters are his strongest. We inhabit Alice\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Alice\u2019s mental health nosedives as she develops what we will later discover is bipolar disorder. It\u2019s here where deBoer loses control. It is impressive how well we inhabit Alice\u2019s mind \u2014 a trickier feat to pull off the more she becomes divorced from reality \u2014 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Mind Reels\u201d 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 \u2014 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\u2019t 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. \u201cThe Mind Reels\u201d 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. \u201cThe Mind Reels\u201d is both too rushed and a slog, unable to develop Alice or to stop itself from hashing out her struggle over and over again.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-1    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>If you are looking for an engaging depiction of mental illness and a lucid portrayal of someone living a heavily medicated life, \u201cThe Mind Reels\u201d can offer you quite a lot. DeBoer himself lives with bipolar disorder, and it\u2019s hard to imagine his personal experience hasn\u2019t had an impact on the sections of the book that feel most real. In line with deBoer\u2019s pundit background, it\u2019s damning to the United States\u2019 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\u2019s just alright.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s interested in, and that he would always allow narrative complexity to fall by the wayside in pursuit of this. \u201cThe Mind Reels\u201d isn\u2019t meant to be compelling fiction \u2014 it\u2019s a portrait of sickness from an author experienced in portraying reality. And, in that sense, it succeeds.<\/p>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Contributor Elias Simon can be reached <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/the-mind-reels-is-a-good-essay-and-an-alright-book\/mailto:elmsimon@umich.edu\"><em>elmsimon@umich.edu<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n<aside>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><h3 class=\"jp-relatedposts-headline\"><em>Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe Mind Reels\u201d is Fredrik deBoer\u2019s first novel \u2014 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\u2019s narrative format to accomplish what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[3814,602,3813,720,3811,3812],"class_list":{"0":"post-3866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-alright","9":"tag-book","10":"tag-essay","11":"tag-good","12":"tag-mind","13":"tag-reels"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3868,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3866\/revisions\/3868"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}