The Ascent of Isaac Steward

After a car crash leaves the protagonist, Isaac, bereft of his wife, Rebekah, and sons Jacob and Esau, French's debut confronts a classic problem: how to render an unreliable narrator and his "[d]ark nightmares of the mind" in ways that: clearly delineate shifts between lucidity and delusion without condescending to the reader; capture the effects (from repetitions and fixations to sensory distortions) with believability rather than indulgence; and avoid clich%C3%A9. French, unfortunately, does not provide Isaac with a strong counterpoint, preventing readers from empathizing. The best works on mental illness, after all, often include a baseline of normalcy from which to gauge the extent of what has been lost. Instead, he immediately immerses his readers in a disorienting, hallucinatory world, revealing Isaac's mind as a site for convoluted scenes populated with figures partly based on those he had known in real life, occasional Biblical allusions, as well as flashbacks, discursions, and a hodgepodge ranging from "temporal prostitutes" to a recurring memory of Punch and Judy. The resulting exercise in selective memory, while ambitious, never quite coheres, and this eccentric tale of madness may be best suited to fans of experimental forms. (June)