cover image Lake Shore Drive

Lake Shore Drive

Patrick Joseph Creevy. Tor Books, $21.95 (383pp) ISBN 978-0-312-85150-7

In inordinately knotted prose, narrator Peter Roche chronicles a debilitating mental breakdown he suffered 13 years ago, when he was in his mid-20s, a graduate student and expectant father. His conflict-ridden relationship with his own father, who has recently died, and his deification of a cynical and troubled friend, Johnny Lemaster, had left him in anguish, afraid of the world and afraid of hoping that he'd get better. As he writes about that time, he discovers that his steadfast wife, Allie, betrayed him with Lemaster years before--engendering another crisis. First novelist Creevy juggles the narratives so that the two crises are resolved simultaneously. Stream-of-consciousness style and much interior monologue convey Peter's disturbed state of mind, but the resulting complicated sentence structure, nonlinear chronology and considerable wordiness add up to a tedious read. (Dec.)