Briefly Noted Book Reviews

The Mind Reels, by Fredrik deBoer (Coffee House). This début caller chronicles a young woman’s unravelling with ethnographic detachment. Alice, a middling pupil astatine a authorities assemblage successful Oklahoma, drifts from teen disorder into sleepless paranoia. Her madness seeps into the everyday: a ablution caddy’s statement becomes impervious of conspiracy, and breakdown coexists with word papers, hookups, and trips to TJ Maxx. Avoiding romance and melodrama, deBoer writes successful an affectless registry that mirrors Alice’s dissociation. The novel’s powerfulness lies successful its relentless banality—the caput churning portion life’s machinery grinds on. During a halting recovery, Alice develops “deep intuitions” astir her medications, which, she suspects, interact “like hot-tempered roommates successful the shabby flat of her brain.”

Pick a Color, by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown). “Everyone is ugly. I should know. I look astatine radical each day.” So begins this coolly observant novel, by a noted short-story writer, which is narrated by the proprietor of a nail salon. The owner, a forty-one-year-old erstwhile boxer, claims to person nary involvement successful different people. And yet she shows herself to beryllium keenly attuned to the desires and anxieties of her clients and to the lives of her employees, 4 Southeast Asian women whose mischievous characterizations see identical haircuts and nametags. With acheronian wit and little touches of tenderness, Thammavongsa’s tableau of working-class beingness casts banal elements—a damaged narrator, a workforce composed wholly of nonwhite women—in an alienating glow.