HOPE FOR THE WORST

In Brandt’s novel, a depressed young woman journeys from New York City to the Himalayas to find herself.

In June 1986, 27-year-old Ellie Adkins lives alone in a four-room apartment in Spanish Harlem and works in a boring, entry-level job at a small nonprofit downtown. Her boyfriend, Seth Federman, has abruptly moved to California to work on Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial campaign, and her best friend Cass is away for the summer. Introverted and lonely, she slides deeper and deeper into apathy and passivity. Searching for the secret to happiness and the truth about love, she rejects an intrusive co-worker’s suggestions of Prozac and therapy and seeks answers in books on magic and spirituality. A flyer in a bookstore leads her to weekly lectures on Buddhism by the charismatic Calvin Ross at a 14th Street loft. Soon she’s entangled in a clandestine relationship with Calvin, a much older man with a long white beard, a slight paunch, and narcissistic tendencies. Cass returns in the fall, with a new punk look and an infatuation with a man who wants to lead an expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. When Ellie travels to Nepal with Cass’ mountain-climbing group, much of what she thought she knew is upended, and she is forced to accept new truths. The author’s spare, direct writing style and pithy descriptions of people and places vividly portray late-1980s New York City. Though intelligent, articulate, and beautiful, Ellie seems unable to say no or to express her true feelings, continually accepting dismissive and demeaning treatment from those around her. Her frustrating lack of agency—an authentic portrayal of depressive thinking—makes her hard to warm up to at first, but her keen perception and frank self-awareness (“When I wake now, there is maybe a nanosecond of me being who I used to be, then I think of Calvin, and become who I am now: a harpy, swooping down to take bites out of myself”) draw the reader in.

A Buddhist seeker’s painful journey—occasionally irritating, ultimately illuminating.