The Red Arrow

by William Brewer

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 AI designer--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.


Desperate for relief, 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.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Mental Health, Novels, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Mystery Thriller

272 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2022

Reviews

[BB Bux · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in two sittings. I found it impossible to put down once I started. This is a book that is both complex and mind blowing, but also warm hearted and life affirming and very funny. Reading it is a kind of psychedelic experience in itself — it feels beamed in from the astral plane. It very gently but with great intelligence changed the ways I think about time, consciousness, art and memory. It also broke my heart in the West Virginia sections, and made me laugh out loud so often. There are gorgeous sentences in here. It’s a kind of love letter, too, to other great works of literature. I highly recommend it.

[Aria Aber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeously written, complex, abundant. Also very funny.

[Angela Mahon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense, intelligent, profound, exhilarating. A book that could be read again and again. I felt like the protagonist was a life long friend by the time I read the last word. Superbly written- superb read.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super raar boek maar vond het verrassend genoeg ook wel heel mooi??

[Blaire Malkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 leaning to 4. Interesting read that made me think a lot about the nature of long-term depression and how it impacts the individual’s relationship to both themselves and to their work and other loved ones. In the novel a young writer gets a break when his short stories about being a Boy Scout in West Virginia are well-received. He confronts this unexpected success while navigating depression, love, and looking back on his family and relationship with his home state. All of this is also framed by an exploration on time and physics. (Note:The water crisis has a big role in the story but in this novel it occurs in Morgantown in 1996.).

[Saf · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think Brewer is talented in writing but, didn't care very much for where the story went. the sections recounting the Great Chemical Spill were probably my favourite and the most gut-wrenching horrifying bit of writing in here. I also feel like the description of depression is ON POINT. But I wouldn't recommend anyone I know read this because it's like a great big diary entry of someone getting magically better after one dose of medicine and then everything becomes a breeze (read:boring).

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brewer's insightful prose feels both illuminating and somehow intimately familiar. It's a complex story about what it means to be human, blurring the lines between the real and the temporal, deftly blending evidence and intuitive experience.

[Kate Connell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an advanced copy of this book thanks to the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, and am grateful for the opportunity. The Red Arrow is a novel about a young author trying to dig himself out of debt. A once promising new writer, who accidently stumbled into the career, over-promised his abilities and now must ghostwrite a memoir for the mysterious Physicist to pay off his debts. The novel begins on his honeymoon, when he is on his way to visit the physicist. The novel manages to span simply the train ride, and also the entire lifetime of the main character without feeling cluttered. This book manages to be one of the most accurate depictions of depression and the holes one digs themselves into when suffering from depression that I have ever read. With an unreliable narrator who admits he himself cannot distinguish his own memories from those of The Physicist; the novel weaves together the two men so thoroughly once they finally come together it all fits. The mysterious treatment looming on every page is of course not a mystery at all, it wonderfully ties back to the beginning. The treatment not only ties back to the beginning, but into the Physicist's tale as well, further blending the two individuals into one mass of memory. This book was a story of love, therapy, learning, and growing artfully told through the lens of the main character that I will come to revisit frequently, and it will feel like a memory.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was like a tremor from within, or not a tremor but a whole chord thrumming deep down in my nuclei in a way that seemed so foundational it was as if gloom was the original force that made up whoever I was, meaning that everything else, from joy to hunger to boredom, was nothing but static, useless signals that had gathered and distracted me from the truth.”

The novel uses scientific principles to examine everyday situations, feelings and memories. So that principles of physics are explained in a simple everyday language, the physicist provides some examples for the protagonist.
“Heisenberg imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or something watches them…When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any precise place. It is not in a ‘place’ at all.”

Later on in the novel the protagonist is panicking in the bathroom.
“…l realized the motion-activated exhaust fan installed in the ceiling was not activating in response to my motion, my pitiful shaking, and for a moment it felt like I was already gone, already a ghost…”
The fan did not register his presence. Both the protagonist and the electrons are not in a ‘place’.

[Daisy Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Red Arrow is quite unlike anything I've read before. Literary fiction can be ponderous and abstract, and this is certainly both. There are no chapters which can be off-putting to some readers. But rambling paragraphs aside, The Red Arrow is deeply perceptive about depression, about suicidal ideation and the longing to not feel 'The Mist' as the narrator refers to his depression. Alongside the hunt for the eluisve physicist, (whose story our protagonist is ghost writing), we are taken on a journey to healing through the use of psilocybin which I found deeply fascinating.

Certainly unusual, certainly slow-paced, The Red Arrow will divide opinion I'm sure, but I really enjoyed its originality and depth.

[Brooke Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This stream of consciousness novel chronicles the memories and mental journey of a writer ( turned “ghostwriter”) and his battle with a depression that he coins “the mist”.

This has elements of Faulkner’s writing style, with Proustian themes, replete with gorgeous passages of philosophical musings. I found the task of “ghostwriting” to get out of his burden of debt from a previous novel to be a great metaphor for being a ghost in his own life under the “mist” and fog of his depression.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/9MAV3Reics8

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flawed debut. Started really promising but then the story became too constucted, too farfetched and tedious. Yet I do think the writer is talented and I'll give his next book another chance

[Emily Carlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exact type of novel I like. Also fun to read narrator getting a coffee on College Ave (my local ave….).

Loled at part where narrator talks about how ugly O’Reilly book cover designs are as he’s helping his designer gf prepare for an interview (“….both somehow industry standards even though the books, with their hideous covers, seemed entirely devoid of any quality design.”)

Alarmingly accurate very long sentence description of the “moving across the country” drive, east to west:

The truck got on the interstate and ate up the road, climbing the hills, fat trees blurring past in a stream of greens and dark mountain shade, long slopes rising and dropping, leading us west toward where the dawn held on, still pregnant with the potential narratives of the day to come, the years to come, the sun at our backs as the hills leveled out into the rolling fields of Ohio, unambitious but honest, past dormant smokestacks and oil derricks abandoned in pastures, rusted and chipped, past Lake Erie country with its wide low sky and northern grays and around there is where I felt a pang of sadness and nostalgia for the world left behind, but it didn’t matter as long as we stayed facing west, so we drove and kept driving past the fecal scent of Gary, Indiana, and the faint outline of Chicago shimmering in the night, and we took a motel somewhere in Iowa, a nonplace, a place where the facts of our life wouldn’t mean anything to anyone, and by the time we got into the bed I was half dozed and my lower back was so sore it felt pumped full of napalm, but I was certain we were entering the new possible goodness, and though i was suddenly too tired to sleep I somehow woke up in the morning to Annie dressed and ready to drive, and I drank water poured straight from the faucet and told her all I wanted was to be in the truck so we got back in and bought drive through coffee and I quizzed her on interview questions while she led us fast into the plains where the road straightens out and the curvature of the earth bends faintly across the length of the windshield against which bugs died in small blips and explosive smacks of goo we’d occasionally stop to wipe off, then keep moving, and somewhere near Cheyenne we slept in a motel with a painting on the wall of two cowboys wrapped in horse blankets huddled around a fire, and in the middle of the night I woke and stood outside the room and smoked cigarettes and watched, I swear, a snowstorm in the middle of summer drag its way over the land, a fast wall of falling white that swallowed every sound and in the time it took me to smoke half a pack a few inches had sugared the parking lot, and the way the snow smelled and sparkled felt clean and brand-new and then when Annie woke it was gone, hot again and dry, and we drove on through the red earth country that felt Martian and soulless but also thrilling and kept on into the mountains so unlike my mountains, all sharp angles and stones, and then down into the sweeping grid of Salt Lake City with its double-wide boulevards and along the shoes of the great dead water and back out into desert land, the wasteland, over into Nevada, and the truck kept moving, and I felt like I understood the secrets of the great wide-open expanse, the flat empty dust-strewn nothings, how they articulated a new emptiness in me, a serene emptiness, the calm left over after a natural disaster when the debris is dragged away and the trash is gone and the totaled houses are torn down, and though nothing’s been fixed yet, it’s quiet and things are going to get fixed, you can just tell, and somewhere out there in Nevada we slept again in another motel where the walls were painted the color of the earth and I slept there truly, a real sleep, a sleep I hadn’t had in years, and the TV stayed off, and when we woke up we drove again through dirty shimmering heat into the incandescent spasms of Reno light and then the almost fictional-looking Sierras with their snow caps and slate grays and sharp pines and then we dropped into the Central Valley and around Sacramento, all flat and busy with big rigs groaning towards the continent’s end, and then we rose again into low hills that trace the edge of San Pablo Bay, spitting us out into Richmond, then down alone the edge of Berkeley, and to our right the waters became the San Francisco Bay and both of us stared wide eyed and childlike at its shining azure madness, and then the infinite Pacific framed in the Golden Gate, it’s grandness and its indifference to the world, and then we crossed the Bay Bridge and I counted the mammoth container ships crawling in and chugging out and I wondered when the last time was that I had a mind quiet enough to count tankers, and then we cruised into San Francisco and the streets cut up and down like they did back home in West Virginia and we both said that to each other, Annie and I, that the streets are like West Virginia’s, the fast hills, the steep turns, and at the Golden Gate Bridge we got out and smelled the winds that has blown there all the way from Asia and watched the water shift from emerald to cobalt to slate to a green more brilliant than the emerald before, and I was crazy enough to think that’s all it’d take — a quick drive across the country—to finally sever myself from my own private hell, when it turned out to be right there, waiting for us, with arms as open as the land.

[Valerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

so gorgeous

[books4chess · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A book can be a totem of the best the human spirit has to offer, but up until the moment it exists it's nothing but another gathering of hypotheticals, contracts, futures."

TW: suicidal tendancies, depression

The protagonist, an artist-turned-author with a long history of depression, embarks on a journey to find the Italian physicist he is ghost writing an autobiography for. We follow his journey as we learn of the massive debt he owes that will fall to his wife if he doesn't cover it and as he reveals a secret treatment that finally removed the 'mist' from his life.

This novel is a beautiful, raw look into how depression can become the person, along with the absolute dissection needed to scare off the mist of darkness for once and for all. The book enabled an incredible amount of character growth through a short novel, allowing the protagonist to take full accountability for his actions and how he has hurt others, as well as seek change from within.

I loved the accountability. The honest descriptions. The bleak, depressing moments, contrasted with hope, new beginnings and an underlying reality that it's never too late to change things. Whether it's chipping away at the looming debt, or repositioning the way we view life, there's hope.

Bravo.

[Ocean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley and to the publisher for providing me with a free copy of this book!

Easily one of the best portrayals of depression I've ever read, from the way it can wreck your life to the suicidal urges, it's terribly relatable.
However, while very well written, I can't say I particularly enjoyed this read. I thought it was rather slow, most of the action in this book is pretty mundane and it's so detail filled that it could have lost me in places. Still I don't regret reading it, it paints a vivid picture of what it's like to live with mental illness but also to come out of it. It was interesting to say the least (the exploration of the concept of time and the new psychedelic treatments in particular).
I would recommend this book to those who favour style from storyline and to anyone who wants to read something that makes them think deeply.

Out on the 12th of May 2022

[Noah Pettinari · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the style of this book is pretty (in my opinion, not incredible, beautiful, or very noteworthy — just pretty), I honestly did not enjoy reading this as much as I thought I would. Besides being what feels like a thinly veiled memoir, it’s one of those books where things happen, but only a vague plot emerges. Some people enjoy that, but I felt lost while reading. Maybe this was the intent of the author, and definitely in line with the theme of how major depression can distort your view of reality, but it read more like the amalgamation of diary entries rather than a cohesive story. Points gained for a new, original, and creative direction, but overall just not my cup of tea.

[Kultura przy herbacie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Czerwona strzała udowadnia, że powieść, w której jednym z głównych wątków jest sztuka i twórczość może być twardym i trafnym obrazem rzeczywistości, w której wszyscy funkcjonujemy
Główny bohater, który jest jednocześnie narratorem opowieści, zmaga się z depresją. Dawno w literaturze nie spotkałam się z tak przejmującym jej przedstawieniem. Choroba jest nazwana Mgłą, czyli zjawiskiem, które ma to do siebie, że może lekko przysłaniać otoczenie, ulatywać, a czasem przytłaczać do klaustrofobicznych granic. Gdy znika, bohater pracuje, rozwija swój związek z Annie, zbiera materiał do książki. A gdy spowija go dochodzi do różnych, nierzadko skrajnych zachowań. Tak jak chory bohater, czytelnik nie wie, kiedy Mgła wróci. Niepokój, lęk związany z tym, co może za chwilę się wydarzyć, udziela się w trakcie czytania.
Powieść jest mocno osadzona w realiach XXI wieku. Annie pracuje w branży zajmującej się AI, bohater również jako artysta wizualny jest kimś pomiędzy tradycyjnym artystą a osobą, która tworzy coś, w czym wkrótce zastąpi go algorytm. Jednocześnie wracamy do przeszłości razem ze wspomnieniami bohatera. Gdy wyrusza w podróż, obserwujemy razem z nim krajobrazy Włoch i kolejne stany USA.
Rozpoczynając lekturę, nie spodziewałam się wiele. Czerwona strzała zapewniła mi jednak wrażenie zajrzenia w umysł artysty i osoby cierpiącej na chorobę, której postrzeganie w społeczeństwie wciąż obarczone jest stygmatyzacją oraz stereotypami. Tak jak głosi opis okładkowy: jest to słodko-gorzka opowieść, w której świat wyobraźni i prostej codzienności splótł się, tworząc naprawdę dobrą powieść.

[Casi ! · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to separate this from the fact that I was taught by Will, and he was the best teacher I had at Stanford, but I absolutely loved reading this book. I love a non-fiction recollection and reckoning (I know this is fiction, but it reads as very true to fact, whether it is or isn’t), a meditation on spirituality, ego, creativity, relationships, drugs. It was everything I find myself wondering about. I read it as true testimony and it has inspired me to rethink my relationship to psychedelics as an extremely important resource for mental health care and have shipped my copy to a friend and sent the title to a few others. Maybe one day they too will have a similar story.

Def worth a read !

[Lizzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book based on reviews but found it incredibly depressing and only picked up during the last 40 pages… I support its message and loved the topic of alternative treatments for depression but the whole book was leading up to the last section.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

gotta say i loved this!

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

guess I have to try shrooms now?

[joanns ☾ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Aumaine Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wild ride that is difficult to see as fully intentional but does include moments of lucidity and poignancy in narrative

[Dianne Alvine · Rating 2 out of 5]

An unnamed narrator who suffers from what he calls 'The Mist,' or Major Depression with Suicidal Ideation, is the protagonist of this story. The narrator tells his story, in a stream of consciousness style, while on the Frecchiarosa train in Rome, Italy.

He relates how he met Annie, the woman he marries and how he manages to hide his suicidal ideas from her, and lies to compensate for the truth about various matters. His mental health issue leads him to make unsound decisions, which then leads him to overwhelming debt.

The bottom line is that he accepts a job to ghostwrite a memoir for a physicist in Italy, in hopes that he can erase this huge debt. But, before the trip to Rome, he undergoes The Treatment, with the psychedelic drug, psilocybin. Up to this point his mental illness has been resistant to any drug interventions. However, The Treatment has done wonders for him and has changed his life.

He's halfway done with the memoir, but for some reason the physicist has disappeared, and now he needs to find him so he can finish the memoir, pay off his debt, and get on with his newfound life. Feeling happy and with a clear mind, while on his honeymoon in Italy, he gets on the Frecciarosa train in Rome to find the physicist.

The segment about the Great Monongahela River Chemical Spill, that the narrator lived through, was heart wrenching to say the least. It was sickening, disgusting, and horrifying to know what these people went through, and how the authorities didn't notify the community as soon as possible. Ironically, this part of the narrator's story gripped me more than anything else in the book.

The story got tedious for me and about halfway through I wanted it to end. Various theories of physics are threaded in the narrator's thoughts-especially about Time. Although I understand why, it didn't particularly interest me at all. I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway.

[Carrie Everett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cried while reading The Red Arrow but not A Little Life — I didn’t know this book would contain such emotional depth! Not nearly as plot-driven as I was expecting (I think I saw the words “physicist,” “limbo,” “sanity,” and “psychedelic” in the blurb and ran with them), but still kept picking this up. Nowhere in the description was it mentioned that the book is rather dominated by the narrator grappling with suicide, so be warned, I guess. I actually kind of dread my undergrad physics class (only one semester of it left though, yay!) but the way Brewer employs physical theory denotes what I actually do find redeeming about the field. The “quanta of existence.” I don’t worship The Red Arrow the way I do some of my other 5-star ratings, but I didn’t know what else to give it. If I owned a copy it’d probably look like the narrator’s copies of Dispatches.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

At its core, this is a book about books and writing. Brewer’s heavy reliance on book references suggests that he is a widely read and scholarly writer. A partial list of citations includes Sebald, Pollan, Herr, di Lampedusa, Dyer, Rovelli, and Johnson. What could these diverse authors possibly have in common? Well, Brewer sets out to show us and often succeeds yet sometimes just seems to lose his way.

His unnamed narrator is a 30-ish writer who comes to his craft by accident following a failed career as a painter. He wrote a successful book of short stories almost off the cuff. He feels his success was a fluke and undeserved, leaving him with a persistent case of imposter syndrome. Couple this to a 20-year battle with severe depression and one gets a dark picture of self-loathing bordering on the suicidal. Brewer’s depiction of depression is so compelling and persistent as to suggest he has intimate personal knowledge of the illness. He congers the overworked but apt metaphor of a “mist” that descends over him consuming his entire identity— “…gloom was the original force that made up whoever I was.”

The action occurs during a one-day round-trip between Rome and Bologna on Italy’s high-speed train, the Frecciarossa (the red arrow). Brewer uses abundant flashbacks to flesh out his narrative. The writer is ghosting a memoir for an eminent physicist, who has recently disappeared. The train trip is to search for him at his family estate in Modena. It turns out that the writer took a generous advance to write a novel about his childhood experience with a deadly chemical spill that consumed his boyhood hometown in West Virginia. He spent all the money on a lavish wedding and an Italian honeymoon but produced no novel. This memoir is his publishers’ dubious attempt to recover the money he owes them. The writer eventually solves the mystery of the disappeared physicist, but that is decidedly underwhelming.

During the trip, the writer’s ruminations range widely, giving the narrative an unfocussed feel. His experience with depression and its miracle cure using psilocybin is never far from his thoughts. But he also cogitates on physical theories of space and time, the nature of creativity, his strained marriage, his writing career and mentorship by a famous author, and his West Virginia childhood. Regrettably, Brewer’s inability to edit gives his novel a muddled feel. Notwithstanding this, there’s a lot to like in this book. The writing is often quite lyrical, the ideas are smart and timely, the insider’s view of the publishing game is revealing, and of course, the depiction of crippling depression is indeed insightful. For me, the high point was Brewer’s story of his crazy father’s CD collection. He treats this with humor and compassion. One only wishes he had developed it more. Maybe he will in the future. The low point was his miraculous and totally implausible cure from life-long depression with one psychedelic trip. The idea behind such things is intriguing and promising but Brewer seems to oversell it.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for an advanced copy of this new novel.

Life seldom works out the way we want it, and never the way we planned it. Family, school, jobs, debt, love, sickness, health, pandemics, tangle up the trajectory of our our birth to death. Add self- doubt, self- hate, a little bit of self- harm and the world is just a miserable place, more to be endured than to live. William Brewer writes about this and more in his book The Red Arrow, which follows the flight of a man life's with many stops and starts along the way.

A young failed artist/ writer/ husband/ person rides a train in Italy hoping to reach a shot of redemption in the form of a world famous scientist, called by the narrator the Physicist. The narrator was to ghostwrite the memoirs of the Physicist, getting him out of a deep economic hole, but the Physicist ghosted him and everyone involved, making that economic hole even deeper. Along the ride from Rome to Bologna and back the narrator looks back his life, his failures and the cloud of depression he calls "The Mist".

The book is a tough one. Getting into the book might be difficult for a lot of readers, but for certain readers, ie the ones who can feel what this character is going through, and knowing how hard it is to do anything with your own "The Mist" around you it is going to be a painful familiar work. Brewer has a way of writing about depression and that feeling of failure that is almost too real and too painful. Also the book jumps, like a brain in pain always will. Feeling good now, well five years ago you didn't and here is why. Or an hour from now you won't and here is why. The narrator has all sorts of feelings, and yet can't articulate them, hence the failures of the various books. Like I said some might not like it, but those that understand these feelings, will identify all too well.

When I finished I felt that this was a book about the post -(?) pandemic world. A lot of bad feelings, a lot of not being able to talk, a ton of anger, and not sure of what is real, what is worth it, and a doubt of our own self-worth. I understand this character more than I thought I would at the beginning, and yet I still don't know what to feel about him. This is a different kind of story, not for everyone. However if you like challenging fiction, narratives that change and characters you probably know too well, this is the book for you. William Brewer is an author that I am going to have to look out for, just to see where he might go next.

[Hal Lowen · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC provided courtesy of Netgalley (thank you)!

“Oh, by all means – lose your mind. Just understand that you’ll come back, and be better than before.”

I loved this book and I only wish it was longer, honestly. I found it to be a nuanced and well written portrayal of depression and negotiating creative fields (and life) with it, from what I read about the author it’s drawn from experience which definitely shows through in how capably it’s navigated. This also counts for the narrators life in West Virginia in the USA – the author also has that experience! I think that lends the book so much in terms of grounding it well.

The blending of memories, life history and planned next steps all works wonders in the setting of a narrator reminiscing on a train journey to the Physicist. It slips between the three naturally and easily and I might be a little biased because that’s exactly the kind of writing style I adore.

In a way it almost felt TOO good, the hardest parts of the narrators depression felt truly desperate in a way I’ve not encountered before in other novels but I still found it too hard to put down and read it in three days. It is a complex book in terms of the characters - suitably complicated enough to feel like real people but not too complicated as to feel unrelatable or unlikeable. They have flaws and strengths and the narrators affection for his wife through it all are a delight.

The plotting of an ecological crisis and subsequent social crisis through two lenses of nostalgia (it reads better than I make it sound, promise) has a sense of urgency to it that again comes through clearly enough to be 100% totally believable as a real-world event. (If it is a real world event, that would explain why, but I couldn’t find anything when I did get curious).

Overall I really, really loved this book. It’s not my usual genre of fiction but I am SO glad I made the choice to read it.