Alec Walker

This book is like chewing a cud of pre-ripe celery. Whatever hint of flavor there is quickly dissipates, and you can't quite swallow despite how much you chew. The pattern emerges from the very beginning: as soon as the psychiatrist is about to get somewhere, the protagonist changes the subject. It's typically through a kind of bait and switch, except that we switch from something to nothing. Something like, "All of my previous psychiatrists have had radically different theories about me." "Such as?" "How should I know?" These kinds of exchanges would be interesting if any answers were ever revealed, but instead we somehow move on to another topic, leaving anything that started to seem interesting unresolved. I suppose that this is an uninspired way for us to understand that she's smart and in control of the conversation, but there are three very basic problems: 1) Nothing else happens. The entire book is just this over and over, like revving an engine that never starts up to take us anywhere. I would say this is a spoiler, except that there's nothing to spoil. If you're looking for a story, this is not one. If you're hoping for an interesting twist to be revealed, there isn't one. If you're hoping that a coherent bold philosophical idea emerges, none does. 2) We don't get enough about the characters to provide context for the philosophical discussions they continuously start to have. I can only think of two meaningful things we learn about each of the protagonist and the doctor. When they disagree, or when one is confused, or when one feels that they've scored a point, we can't relate to them, and so we don't have a way to derive any real insight. The author should have written an essay (if there was actually a point); the characters and setting are completely superfluous. 3) The philosophical explorations typically involve cheap references to mathematics and physics theories and to the lives of the people involved in those theories. Cheap because they are referenced without being explained or connected to what could otherwise have been interesting or even coherent points. They are simply more disjointed distractions. Something like: "Euler believed that all of mathematics was dynamic. Everything we knew about the fundamental axioms that let us pretend we know about truth are subject to change." "I failed to see how this is relevant." "Of course you do." Then the conversation moves on in another random direction. No coherent patterns emerge from these clues except that she is smarter than he is and won't let him understand her and that he is dumber than she is and refuses to take the initiative to corral her into making sense. If the point is to get us more interested in the notion of subjective reality versus objective reality, perhaps the complete lack of direction is a deliberate mechanism. If so, all I can say is that it's hard to be interested in a notion propelled by so boring and frustrating a medium. I wish I had spit out the cud after chapter 1.