Lisa Loren: Catalysis

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. It cannot be proven to exist.

Hallucinating Foucault is an intricate, intellectual novel, a light shining into that dark corner where romantic passion and scholarship meet. It is as deeply flawed as only a first novel can be, but charming. It features a young graduate student, studying the works of famous and wild French author Paul Michel, whose Germanist lover pushes him into tracking down the author. Michel, a paranoid schizophrenic, has been living in an asylum for ten years.

I found myself swept off my feet by this novel, willing to forgive even it most improbable twists and bizarre characters. The narrative has a dreamlike quality, held together by its own internal logic. The first half of the novel is especially captivating, dominated by a love affair and academia: everyday stuff, if a bit surreal. Dunker’s second half is a little shakier, as the schizophrenic Paul Michel takes on a larger role and the narrator leaves his everyday life behind. Michel goes sane a little too quickly under the narrator’s influence, playing too easily into the old trope of mental illness cured by the power of love. The narrator, on the other hand, carries the story forward, with a delicate voice and that captures Duncker’s fine eye for detail. In the end, his cool, almost clinical descriptions of passion pulled me through to the end.

Foucault plays a part in the back story but, disappointingly, completely fails to appear.

In the afterword to her book, The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks mentions that a psychiatrist friend cautioned her to use a pen name, lest she be known publicly as “the schizophrenic with a job.” Her descriptions of psychosis are so lucid that it’s easy to see why friends would want her to hide it. Saks has been crazy in the worst sense possible, paranoid and raving and threatening violence. In this memoir, I feel like I’ve been given a window into what schizophrenia looks like from the outside and feels like from within. If this written had been written by someone who didn’t suffer from schizophrenia, I would call it “compassionate”, but the word doesn’t quite seem to fit in this case. Saks wastes no time in self-pity. This is a brave book, at the heart of it, filled with the hope that one day we all can get the help we need to live.

I admit, I came to the book already in awe of Ms. Saks. Only one out of ten schizophrenics manages to hold a job, let alone win awards or publish books. Forty years ago, Saks would have been confined to an institution for life, without the hope of treatment. Her CV is inspiring. This book is less a motivational speech than a window into another world, where beings from the sky control people’s thoughts and someone can die ten times a day and still be around to worry about it happening again. That she built herself a sane life, however fragile, is a testament to her doctors, her friends, and her own iron will.

Highly recommended.

by Pete Earley

In reading about mental illness and treatment, you come across crazy people who think that all psychiatric drugs are poison, and crazy people who thing that all mentally ill people should be forcibly medicated. Pete Earley isn’t a another distinct type of personality; one of those family members who believes that everything would be okay, if only they had the power to hospitalize and drug their family members without their consent. It’s kind of touching and a little sad. If only hospitals were that much better than the prison wards, and everyone could get enough time in them. If only we could cure mental illnesses instead of trying to manage them, and picking up the pieces when out loved ones inevitably fall down.

I’ll be honest: this book scares me. Pete Earley takes the sickest of the sick, the most violent and disjointed of the mentally ill, and generalizes out from them. He doesn’t come out and say it, I don’t think, but it’s pretty clear that he thinks all mentally ill people should be forcibly medicated, and possibly hospitalized long-term. Thanks, Pete, but I’ve read about the days when family members could lock people away on word-of-craziness alone. Back when women who didn’t want husbands were considered insane and institutionalized? I don’t deny the existence of mental illness, oh no, but I’ve read my history, and I know that it’s subjective. There are no tests for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, no way to tell for sure if someone ought to be given medication. Our mental health system is pretty horrific for criminals, but Pete Earley doesn’t have any good solutions for fixing it.

I know this man comes from a fundamentally compassionate place, but I feel like I need to read an anti-Prozac diatribe just to get the feel of it out of my head.