The Red Arrow
A novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant, utterly contemporary debut novel about a ghostwriter in search of his subject—a famous physicist who has vanished—only to discover their lives align perfectly within the riddles of time and space.
When a once-promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous physicist’s memoir, his livelihood is already in jeopardy: plagued by debt, he’s grown distant from his wife—a successful A.I. designer—and is haunted by an overwhelming dread he describes as “The Mist.” Then, things get worse: the physicist disappears, leaving everything in limbo, including our narrator’s sanity.
Desperate for relief, he undergoes an experimental, psychedelic treatment and emerges to find his world transformed: joy suffuses every moment. His opportunities are endless. For the first time, he understands himself in a larger, universal context and feels he might finally know how to reclaim his past and future alike.
Moving swiftly across time and geography—from a chemical spill in West Virginia, to psychedelic therapy in California, to a frecciarossa racing across the Italian countryside—The Red Arrow is a spiraling, spellbinding, and often comedic journey through art, memory, and the contradicting layers that compose the self.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Brewer's cerebral, somewhat muddled debut novel (after the poetry collection I Know Your Mind), a depressed writer embarks on a mind-bending journey of self-discovery. The unnamed novelist travels from Rome to Bologna to track down a famous physicist whose memoir he has agreed to ghostwrite in order to pay back a debt to his publisher. "The more of his life I write, the more of my life I get back," says the writer, who blew his advance for an abandoned novel about a chemical spill in his home state of West Virginia. His artistic failure stems partly from his suicidal depression, which he seeks to cure through hallucinogens. On the train to and from Bologna, he unfurls his memories of the spill, "an event whose damage was still rippling out across my life"; of his New York City days as a struggling painter before turning to writing; and of the physicist's reticence around the "great realization" that led to his theory of quantum gravity. Brewer addresses the challenges of describing a historical disaster, psychic pain, and the knotty realities of spacetime, with his protagonist openly admitting his failure to do so. The written attempts, though, often verge on the elliptical monologues of True Detective, and not in a good way. In the end, this doesn't quite cohere.
