When a once promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous particle physicist's memoir, his livelihood is already in jeopardy: plagued by debt after failing to deliver a novel, he's grown distant from his wife and is haunted by an overwhelming dread he describes as "The Mist."
Even for a work of literary fiction, this is a notably bookish effort, a heady, inventive novel with intelligent things to say about mental illness, perception, creativity and psychedelic drugs ... This novel works on numerous levels. The gradually revealed parallels between what the physicist calls his 'breakthrough in perception' and the narrator’s quest to temper his psychological pain are at once thought-provoking and stirring. Meanwhile, Brewer’s depiction of depression — particularly the agony it causes the narrator’s wife, Annie — is heartrending. And he skillfully melds empathy and humor ... Brewer, too, deserves praise for what might be called narrative fortitude. For a novelist, it’s no easy task to successfully employ books as plot engines (the narrator also has meaningful experiences with writings by W.G. Sebald, Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Geoff Dyer). Nor is it an opportunistic path to surefire best-sellerdom. Rather, it’s the work of a confident writer who isn’t beholden to convention or market considerations ... Late in The Red Arrow, Brewer’s narrator confesses his doubts about artistic originality — does it even exist? This distinctive novel suggests that it does.
... impressive ... Brewer skillfully articulate the man’s deep wells of pain and resentment in quick swings ... The dissonance between how he abstractly portrays the treatment and how it’s handled is a peculiar distraction. Brewer centers much of the narrator’s experience on the books he reads and the thin line between reading or hearing about something and experiencing it yourself ... Brewer’s precision in writing these sequences makes them feel more like fate than authorial contrivance. Brewer makes this work with matter of fact and direct prose, indulging only occasionally in an imagistic flourish to remind readers his narrator is a writer ... is more about enjoying the mysterious way these events unfold than understanding why things have happened the way they have. This contrasts sometimes uncomfortably with the life and aims of the Physicist, who seeks, as scientists tend to do, to ask the right questions and find the right answers. Brewer, in the end, ties some ends that would have been better left loose ... When The Red Arrow wraps up, its handling is more interesting than it is satisfying. But, as the book’s structure implies, sometimes the journey is more important than the destination.
... much more grounded and character-based than the Pynchonian setup might suggest ... Brewer’s evocation of the Mist is among the most accurate and insightful depictions of depression I’ve ever read. The metaphor of the fog is serviceable, though not particularly original, and the way the narrator characterizes his mental struggles is illuminating ... Brewer is also a poet, a fact reflected in some of the novel’s exquisite language, but he is often at his best when he is most novelistic, as in his sneakily long sentences, some of which stretch on for more than a page. It’s a testament to his skill, and his transfixing language, that readers may not even register their length ... The narrator’s depression runs deep and nearly leads him to suicide numerous times. His transformation into a fully cured and functioning adult stretches credulity. But as an examination of mental health, of how physics and art and consciousness all have their role to play in it — are indeed intertwined with it — and as a novel of ideas that also creates a fully fleshed narrator with a convincing inner life, The Red Arrow succeeds. It is a beguiling and ruminative synthesis of strange couplings: art and physics, psychology and psychedelics, characters and ideas.
