Author's debut unimpressive

Fevers of the Mind, the debut novel by Avery Z. Conner, is a detailed memoir of the author's descent into mental illness, as well as his slow and varied recovery. He painstakingly describes his life (all 30 years of it) in a verbose and self-serving story touting his own genius. While mental illness can be an extremely interesting topic, this novel degenerated from a somewhat interesting autobiography into a repetitive and boring recap of the author's mental state and medications.\nFevers starts by narrating the highlights of Conner's childhood romps in Lafayette, Ind. While this section was enjoyable, the book quickly degenerated. Conner's description of high school, as well as his extremely high academic achievements, was arrogant to the extreme. While attending IU on a prestigious Wells Scholarship is certainly something to be proud of, it is not something that needs to be reiterated on over 20 pages. \nAfter touting his own genius at IU, Conner moves on to his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. This is the section of the book where his mental illness becomes apparent. His descriptions of his symptoms, as well as his perception of the world at this time were extremely interesting. However, the good qualities of this section of the text were marred by the overly repetitive and detailed descriptions of his medications. The remainder of the book continues much as the previous sections did, with very interesting pockets of text in an otherwise boring and verbose tale. \nFevers is not written with an engaging style; it reads more like an academic paper than a story that is meant to capture the reader's attention. While one would expect a first novel to have a cruder form than later works, the level of choppiness in the text makes it almost unreadable.\nAside from style problems, Conner fails to attract as much of my sympathy as he must have intended. The book reflects the author's enormous ego, alienating the reader from the storyteller. In fact, this ego may serve to explain why the book was written in the first place. \nAll in all, if mental illness is a particular interest, I may suggest that someone read it. Otherwise, steer clear of this disaster.