“The Mind Reels” Book Review

I preordered Freddie deBoer’s debut novel, “The Mind Reels,” on Aug. 2, more than two months before its release. My excitement for the novel had little to do with its premise; in fact, I barely skimmed the book’s description before I ordered it. DeBoer has previously written two non-fiction books on education policy and social justice, respectively. He is a self-avowed Marxist who frequently criticizes other members of the left. His primary platform is Substack. DeBoer is such an engaging writer that I will read almost anything he writes — minor debates in sports coverage I don’t follow, gripes with company fanbases I didn’t know existed, or complete and utter disdain for the very opinions I hold. He’s just that kind of writer. So I was very excited that he was taking his prodigious talent to fiction.

The plot of “The Mind Reels” is not hard to recount. Alice is an utterly average native of Oklahoma. She is rejected from her target schools and goes to the University of Oklahoma, where her bipolar disorder — although never named in the novel — begins to crush her. She loses friends, meets with unhelpful doctors at her mother’s desperate insistence, experiences manic episodes that lead to psychosis, enters treatment, relapses, and so on. Only 152 pages long, the novel follows her into her mid-thirties. It is, according to deBoer, an alternative to a memoir about his own bipolar disorder — an attempt “to use fiction to convey the reality of bipolar disorder.”

The prose is brilliant: The descriptions are precise, beautiful, and incredibly readable despite being far from minimalist in structure or vocabulary. The language ably propels the reader; there is something to reading deBoer (to me, at least) that feels uniquely like gliding. During a state of recovery, Alice remembers her manic episodes as when “her body was made of electricity and she walked naked under the light of a stark and friendly moon.” That might be my favorite sentence in the book, but there are many contenders. 

The most striking literary quality about “The Mind Reels” is its persistent refusal to skirt near anything that could possibly be mistaken as romanticization. The novel is explicitly a reaction to what deBoer deems the romanticization of mental illness. There is little in the way of plot structure — of rising action, of anticipating a climax, etc. To do otherwise would have been artificial, as involving Alice in a dramatic entanglement would have made this a moralizing parable about mental illness. But deBoer gives us something much more useful: a portrait. DeBoer’s ability to make Alice’s experience feel as important as it is without any overly constructed plot — primarily through his prose — is one of the most impressive things about the novel.

“The Mind Reels” is first and foremost deBoer’s testimony about what it is like to live with mental illness. The accounts of Alice’s psychology are illuminating. I learned a lot from the book, and I think that anyone who does not have bipolar disorder would as well. Reading the Wikipedia page for the condition in the wake of this book, I was struck by the inevitable discrepancy between a clinical description of something like bipolar disorder and the psychological experience explicated via Alice’s character: It lists “racing thoughts” as a symptom of the condition, then gets on with it. This is, of course, one reason why literature is important. DeBoer describes expertly the pressure exerted on Alice by uncontrollable thoughts in passage after passage. There is so much to learn from the descriptions of Alice’s mania, from both her time at the psych ward and her horrendous but necessary regimen of stabilizers and antidepressants. This is also true of the book’s depictions of her manic episodes, which feature its most gripping writing. 

However, the book is not a capital-G “Great” novel by any stretch of the imagination. DeBoer delivers incredibly written scenes, but they often jump to something else before they seem to have run their course. The chapters feel mostly self-contained, and the ratio of immediate action or psychological description to summary of what has taken place since the last chapter is not favorable. And the narrative style is weird: The narrator is mostly third-person focused on Alice, but there is little of “free indirect discourse” — that is, the interjection of a character’s thoughts into the narration. The result, given the long descriptions of Alice’s thoughts, is overuse of the “she” pronoun and Alice’s name. The point of this may be to distance Alice from her own thoughts, to create a membrane that mimics the impenetrability of mental illness, and that is part of the effect. But it also takes away slightly from the power of certain passages.

That “The Mind Reels” refuses to romanticize also means that it refuses to be a literary tragedy. I think there might be a problem with Alice being exceptionally unexceptional — her illness unravels her life before we have any idea what that life might have been otherwise. The reader is not caught up in any of her aspirations or unique aspects of her personality. We only gain insight into a few of her passions (she writes a short story and presses insects). Don’t get me wrong: You still feel horrible reading about Alice’s life. But I, at least, didn’t feel the intense empathy and hope for redemption that some novels engender for their protagonist. This might be partly by design. Alice describes the effect of her drug machine as similar to that of a guitar effect pedal that cuts out both the high and low range of the spectrum, and deBoer is very big on describing life as a muted, disappointing misery — he’s a pretty horrible pessimist. But I can’t help but feel that deBoer is cutting out something from reality. Of the countless boys Alice uses to feel better — seemingly all of which the narration clarifies she has no love for — at least one seems to have a genuine affection for her. Could deBoer write an extra page to give us a good idea of why? The book skims over these kinds of details as if they are unimportant, but when you are telling a story about a person, they are. 

I have written two paragraphs’ worth of criticism because this is a book review, and I want to be honest about the book’s flaws. But I want to be clear: This is a terribly important book. And it is a good, enjoyable one, just not a great one. DeBoer marked the release of his book with a very deBoerian argument against committing suicide. I don’t have any particular knowledge of or experience with bipolar disorder. I read this book and wrote this review because of my excitement for deBoer as a literary fiction author. So I was surprised and horrified by this statistic: “Somewhere between 30% and 60% of [people with bipolar disorder] attempt suicide in [their] lives; something like 10% to 20% of [them] succeed.” Around 2% of the population is bipolar. Many of us — rightfully! — spend large amounts of time trying to understand the experiences of marginalized groups that are smaller than that and at no more risk. I think — for those of us who are not bipolar — it is worth doing the same for this group. While one should be careful not to over-generalize from deBoer’s depiction, “The Mind Reels” will greatly increase understanding and empathy for an extremely at-risk group, in exchange for only a couple of hours of your time.