Solo Pass: A Novel

by Ronald De Feo

Overview

A dark yet often funny novel narrated by a man who, for the past two months, has been a patient at a New York City mental ward. Having suffered a breakdown—due to his shattered marriage and an irrational fear of fading away as a human—he now finds himself caught between two worlds, neither of which is a place of comfort or fulfillment: the world of the ward, where abnormality and an odd sort of freedom reign, and the outside world, where convention and restrictive behavior rule. Finally on his way to becoming reasonably “normal” again, he requests and is granted a “solo pass,” which allows him to leave the (locked) ward for several hours and visit the city, with the promise that he will return to the hospital by evening.
 
As he prepares for his excursion, we get a picture of the ward he will temporarily leave behind—the staff and the patients, notably Mandy Reid, a schizophrenic and nymphomaniac who has become his closest friend there. Solo Pass is an unsettling satire that depicts, with inverted logic, the difficulties of madness and normalcy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590515815
Publisher:	Other Press, LLC
Publication date:	03/05/2013
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ronald De Feo is the author of Calling Mr. King (Other Press). He has written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, the New Republic, and the National Review. His short fiction has been published widely in national magazines including the Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, and North American Review, and he worked for nine years as senior editor at ARTnews. He now serves on the advisory board of Review Magazine, devoted to Latin American and Canadian literature and the arts.

Editorial Reviews

"A quirky, funny tale that forces the reader to question the line between inside and outside, insanity and normalcy, confinement and freedom." -Booklist Online

"Some parts of the book were really quite funny and others were heartbreakingly sad. The characters were all very human and parts of the storyline kept me guessing. I will definitely seek out more from this author." -Reading in Progress

"In this highly engaging novel, Ott presents his version of events, but we are still able to see cracks in the narrative, and eventually a well-formed picture of what really happened emerges...Ultimately, author De Feo shows that the weight of conformity and a desire to belong to a social group can be both a terrible burden, an overwhelming challenge, and oddly enough a liberating choice." -Swiftly Tilting Planet

From the Publisher

The drama inside a mental patient's mind fails to sustain the reader's interest. This short, sketchy novel is slightly longer than a novella, but not deeper. With more concision, it could have been a short story, encompassing one day in the life of a middle-aged man whose good behavior (or at least simulation of sanity) has rewarded him with an afternoon free in Manhattan from his confinement (the "solo pass" of the title). The second novel by De Feo (Calling Mr. King, 2011) finds the protagonist sharing his anticipation of and preparation for this excursion, his anxiety-inducing (though ultimately uneventful) visit to the world of the supposedly better adjusted and his return to a place where he now feels he fits. He also shares his back story in bits and pieces, letting the reader fill in the gaps and decide what to believe (since a mental patient could be the definitive embodiment of the unreliable narrator). He describes a turning point that he says "possibly marked the beginning of the end of my sanity," yet elsewhere indicates that he felt there was something that set him apart for as long as he could remember, that his "problem went quite a bit beyond shyness," and that his mother made much of his boyhood "inability to mingle." His problems connecting with others cost him his job in publishing as an editor and his marriage to a woman from whom he withdrew. It also led him to an initial experience with therapy that crossed the line from unfortunate to unethical, precipitating the breakdown that resulted in his being institutionalized and providing the main thread of narrative momentum here. (Will he seek revenge on his former therapist during his afternoon off?) The brief return to the outside world lets him know where he feels most at home. Not much in the way of revelation or climactic arc.

Kirkus Reviews