After reading the Sunday Times I was eager to get my hands on this book.The notion of detailing the psychology of a teenage schitzophrenic appealed to me because of the sheer challenge such a project would entail - an attempt to express the ineffable, if you will.

It is difficult to argue that Wrey succeeds in his effort, since I have no personal experiance with schitzophrenia, but the psychology that he does map out in this underground world (so to speak) is nothing short of impressive.

One has to applaud Wrey not only for the control of his prose and the range of his strokes, but also for all the subtleties that bring out the character of the protagonist and of the city he exists in.For instance, the setting is the New York City subway, which, like public transportation systems in most major cities, is filled with that strange sense of "otherness." The subway itself has that schitzophrenic, "wasteland" (in the TS Eliot sense of the word) surreality.

It's like looking well under the cracks of society, and, in effect, finding the unstable essence underneath.There are other subtle aspects of the narrative that work to same effect (like ciphers embedded in the text, or the ebb and flow of the structure), but I probably shouldn't spoil these things for others.

There were a couple of instances where I felt a little enclosed in the simple, declarative style of minimalism that Wrey wrote in.

On the other hand, the decision to do seems fitting and appropriate; that is, symptomatic of the protagonist's incapacitating schitzophrenia.Other times the way that Wrey describes the surreality of this almost hallucinogenic world has a poetic edge that is on point.