Book Review: “The Red Arrow” — All Aboard!

By Drew Hart

When did we last see a novel of such stimulating complexity that’s so downright hopeful too?

The Red Arrow by William Brewer. Knopf, 272 pp., $27.

Hmm, you say you’re going on a trip soon? Airfare, gas prices… they’re no object? Kind of have to wonder about that, and in a season that is so riddled with horrifying developments nationwide, isn’t it more tempting to hide under the bed? Alright, let’s shut up already.

What may be just as transporting now — something to experience if not under the bed, then in it, should you like — is a whirlwind ride with The Red Arrow, a debut novel from William Brewer, an award-winning poet and resident writer at Stanford. The story here is told through reflection by a struggling novelist as he rides through Italy from Rome to Emilia-Romagna on a train — the “Red Arrow’”of the title (or “Frecciarossa”) — in search of a man he is ghostwriting an autobiography for. He’s a world-renowned physicist, and although they’ve been working on his book for a while, he has disappeared, dropped out of sight. The editor on the project is frantic, texting incessantly… where is he? Our writer (never named — oodles of dialogue in which no one ever addresses him?) has evaded past suicide attempts by treating his major depression through a treatment not to be revealed here. He’s working on this book in order to pay back the publisher for an advance on the one he couldn’t write himself, and should he not succeed, his life will be in tatters? On top of that, he’s also on his honeymoon…

While we ride with our narrator on the high-speed Red Arrow, we are tossed around in the maelstrom of his mind, hearing of a past that plays in near stream-of-consciousness mode. Elaborate rambling sentences veer from one moment in life to another suddenly; passages run on for pages unbroken (somehow sustained clearly). For example, one section recounts a car trip from the East coast to the Bay Area, rolling along like the car itself. Cormac McCarthy would probably approve, the way things are spelled out. The writer vividly recounts his bouts of depression — expressing them as “mists,” kinds of shroudlike gloominess that swallowed him alive, which nothing seemed to ward off — not meditation, not bad psychiatrists. And this is the foundation for what is one of the most clearly evoked accounts of a writer’s block one can recall. (It’s funny that this, a first novel, didn’t get mired down in it too.)

While chronicling this, The Red Arrow also tells of a frightening, unknown part of American history powerfully captured here: a 1990s chemical spill that wreaked utter havoc and led to rioting in our hero’s West Virginia hometown, all of which was covered up in national media, and which he struggled through personally. We learn what happened, but later on our frustrated writer can’t figure out how to tell its story in his novel. Completely stymied by it, he avoids his dilemma by burying himself in reading and rereading Michael Herr’s Dispatches. (Your F.C.** approves — as “writer’s writer” magnum opuses go, is it not the shizzle?) Further along, there’s mention of Geoff Dyer, another source of inspiration; also germane to the story are D.H. Lawrence, W.G. Sebald, John Berger, and, for significant reasons — Aldous Huxley.

You’re lost by now? To simplify, Brewer’s book, one of frustrated authors, transcendent scientists, even surfer literary agents(!), if not cabbages and kings, is a marvelous voyage with well-crafted characters. It’s neurotic, yes… intensely cerebral, yes. It’s additionally a most moving portrait of brilliant love — our narrator’s wife Annie, an AI developer of some variety, is a devoted partner anyone would be envious to be with: dynamic, unbendingly supportive, unfailingly intelligent. You may become jealous! And it ends happily — through intuition, her new husband finds the physicist, holed up in a villa in the countryside near Modena. As the two talk in a garden, a lot of intriguing theories, for which this man has become celebrated, are expounded. He (also unnamed) proposes that “time does not exist.” Space and time are melded. Memories merge… shared between us, uniting us. (To use a pop reference, the “folded space” of Dune comes to mind. There is even — as close to a spoiler alert as you’ll get reading this — a “spice Melange.”)

In its last pages, the writer returns to Rome, confident that he’ll be able to complete his project, and move ahead in life with a terrific young marriage. Now when did we last see a book of such stimulating complexity that’s so downright hopeful too? Maybe skip the vacation this year, and hole up with it.


**Drew Hart is the F.C. – ‘faithful correspondent” – writing from Santa Barbara, California.

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