The Red Arrow
A novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
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 and is haunted by an overwhelming sense of dread he describes as “The Mist.” Then, things get worse: The physicist vanishes, leaving everything in limbo, including our narrator’s sanity.
"Among the most accurate and insightful depictions of depression I’ve ever read." —Los Angeles Times
"Brewer’s earnest description of psilocybin therapy turns a bravura comic novel into something deeper and stranger: an account of unexpected, hard-won joy.” —Vogue
In an attempt rid himself of "The Mist," the young writer undergoes an experimental, psychedelic treatment and finds his world completely transformed: Joy suffuses every moment. For the first time, he understands himself in a larger, universal context, and feels his life shift, refract, and crack open to reveal his past and future alike.
Moving swiftly from a chemical spill in West Virginia to Silicon Valley, from a Brooklyn art studio to a high-speed train racing across the Italian countryside, The Red Arrow wades into the shadowy depths of the human psyche only to emerge, as if speeding through a mile-long tunnel, into a world that is so bright and wondrous, it almost feels completely new.
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.
