ME, MYSELF AND IKE

What begins as compelling mystery degenerates into a tale of mental illness existing only for tragedy. Kit’s lost touch with his old friends and is left with only the repellent Ike, a malcontent who goads him into shoplifting, getting an illegal tattoo and planning a dramatic mountaintop suicide. Through Kit’s first-person perspective, readers see the rubble of relationships: an ex-girlfriend, confused family, baffled teachers. As he prepares for his suicide (in which he hopes his body will be frozen as a relic of the 21st century for future archaeologists) his narration becomes increasingly erratic. In a nice twist, Kit’s thoughts remain comprehensible far longer than interspersed excerpts of his increasingly paranoid writing. He falls into an extremity of mental illness, avoiding death only by a highly unrealistic rescue, with no hope of character transformation from within. Ultimately, Kit makes no decisions that are not the product of his illness—which not only equates the protagonist with his disability but produces a bleak, pointless progression for an initially promising novel. (Fiction. 12-14)