The Mind Reels, by Fredrik deBoer (Coffee House). This début novel chronicles a young woman’s unravelling with ethnographic detachment. Alice, a middling student at a state university in Oklahoma, drifts from adolescent confusion into sleepless paranoia. Her madness seeps into the everyday: a shower caddy’s arrangement becomes proof of conspiracy, and breakdown coexists with term papers, hookups, and trips to TJ Maxx. Avoiding romance and melodrama, deBoer writes in an affectless register that mirrors Alice’s dissociation. The novel’s power lies in its relentless banality—the mind churning while life’s machinery grinds on. During a halting recovery, Alice develops “deep intuitions” about her medications, which, she suspects, interact “like hot-tempered roommates in the shabby apartment of her brain.”
Pick a Color, by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown). “Everyone is ugly. I should know. I look at people all day.” So begins this coolly observant novel, by a noted short-story writer, which is narrated by the owner of a nail salon. The owner, a forty-one-year-old former boxer, claims to have no interest in other people. And yet she shows herself to be keenly attuned to the desires and anxieties of her clients and to the lives of her employees, four Southeast Asian women whose mischievous characterizations include identical haircuts and nametags. With dark humor and brief touches of tenderness, Thammavongsa’s tableau of working-class life casts stock elements—a damaged narrator, a workforce composed entirely of nonwhite women—in an alienating glow.
