Book Review: Path Illogical

Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

An earnest memoir of self-discovery brightly exploring mental health and the Big Apple

After moving from California to New York City for college, Nathan Kastle discovered that he had been suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. Path Illogical recounts his journey of realization and treatment, along with his early experiences as a freshman in the metropolis. It is a relatable story, able to entertain and move, and it will manage to activate even the most indifferent reader’s empathy for people suffering from OCD.

Kastle arrives in Manhattan, whose overwhelming, claustrophobic busyness he beautifully contrasts with the open spaces of his native Bay Area. He is there to study drama at New York University, his dream being to become a respected actor. The other students turn out to be quite different from himself: they prefer to talk, while he prefers to listen, and they express themselves passionately and freely, something which to him seems precarious. His discomfort in this new environment brings out a curious coping mechanism characterized by repetitiveness, which leads him to face the reality of a plausible diagnosis.

Having previously only caught glimpses of OCD, for example in the title character of the TV series Monk, and after googling its symptoms, he starts going to a therapist. He is skeptical and reluctant to accept her advice, which can be summed up as embracing uncertainty and becoming more mentally flexible, and he is especially averse to receiving medication.

At length, with the help of his parents, he finds himself at the McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Massachusetts, famous in literature from its cruel portrayal in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. This institution is an altogether different place than Plath’s, as Kastle describes his weeks-long stay there with great appreciation.

Kastle writes in short chapters and simple yet playful language, which helps to hold the attention of even most easily distracted readers. His descriptions of his newly-found densely populated concrete jungle are marvelous. Under his pen, the passengers on the subway sway and jerk uniformly, as if they are “a bucket of bait.” Uniformity is the word for the population of the vast city, in the hordes of which “whatever good and evil lived here was churning untraceably.” The reader might feel like it is their own first time in the Big Apple.

The book also accurately evokes the experience of starting college, especially but not exclusively in an arts field. Kastle describes the successive infatuations with exciting new friends as well as the shock and excitement of being dropped into a completely new group with similar goals to one’s own. And acting receives its due youthful insights: that it can be viewed, for instance, not as an act of self-expression, but as “an act of service, of inhabiting another person and representing them with truthful life.”

Above all, Kastle’s writing does justice to the realities of living with OCD and with mental health problems generally. The emotional exhaustion over completing even life’s most menial tasks, the refusal to ask for help and the urge to avoid it once offered, the antagonistic nature of uncertainty and the adoption of “rituals” to avoid it: they are all here, in Kastle’s powerfully introspective memoir. In the end, Path Illogical brims with a hard-earned self-acceptance. It reassures us that flexibility, that holy grail of mental health, can be achieved one brief stretch at a time.

Thank you for reading Nikolas Mavreas’s book review of Path Illogical by Nathan Kastle! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

The post Book Review: Path Illogical appeared first on Independent Book Review.