For people who like reading and books, books about books are a boon. Not only are you reading a book (an activity that you like), but you’re reading a book about books (things that you like). While I’d like to explain this further, due to space constraints, I’ll move on to typing about the particular book I’d like to recommend.
You can tell William Brewer is a poet in part because he has written an award-winning book of poetry called “I Know Your Kind,” and in part, because the language in his novel “The Red Arrow” is clearly crafted with care, or, if crafted haphazardly, then with a poet’s gifts and instincts. You’ll savor these sentences.
So, in the exquisitely written “The Red Arrow,” a suicidally depressed painter stumbles into writing a novel, and the novel becomes a hit. For a follow-up, the painter-turned-writer sells his agent and publisher on an epic account of a chemical spill in his home state of West Virginia. He is paid a large advance before failing to produce the work he’d been paid for, and so must ghostwrite the memoirs of a physicist in order to repay his debts. Unfortunately, his immense depression makes things difficult. Fortunately, inspired by a New Yorker article and the book its author (Michael Pollan) proceeded to write, he is able to shirk his depression via a guided experience with psychedelics. Unfortunately, just as the physicist’s emailed narration of his life is building to the “great realization” that is the foundation of his work, he goes missing. Fortunately, the advance the ghostwriter had burned through was in part used to fund a honeymoon in Italy, which is also the location of the physicist’s vacation home and high-speed trains, including one whose name translates to the title of the novel.
There are many pleasures in the novel, including a scene that feels like it came from a different, much scarier story about the chemical spill during the narrator’s childhood. The narrator’s lifesaving psychedelic experience is a predictable delight. There’s a replica of a video rental store in a basement. The behavior of a set of twins on a train is amusingly scrutinized. And, like many mind-bending novels, the climactic scene is a friendly conversation over fancy cheese and wine. Perhaps the greatest pleasure is watching a character extract themselves from impending oblivion and insert themselves into the beautiful world they’re newly capable of seeing and appreciating. Ultimately, though, as is often the case, it’s probably that absolutely incredible-sounding cheese.
