The virtues of the feel-bad book By Caroline Leavitt, 5/25/2003 As the days grow warmer, the sunniest novels start appearing, most with redemption on their finish line. Personally, I think it's a mistake to believe that as the weather lightens up, so should our reading material. There's something to be said for the dark ending, for a book that doesn't necessarily make you feel better but does indeed make you feel, that stays with you in real and important ways. With this in mind, I say let's hear it for the unhappy ending.

A Mouthful of Air, by Amy Koppelman ($23), is a quieter book, but one no less remarkable. It comes from MacAdam/Cage, a small publisher in San Francisco known for nurturing many original new writers. Just 212 pages, it follows Julie Davis, a Manhattan wife with a pampered exterior life and a tortured interior one. She's got the adoring husband, the perfect little boy, and the enviable apartment, but she's also recovering from a suicide attempt, and is still battling– with the help of medicine and her own fragile will - a fierce, almost crippling depression. Everything's held in careful check, until she finds she's pregnant again and is forced to decide what's best for her and her baby. Does she stay on the meds and risk harm to her child, or does she go cold turkey with potentially devastating results to herself and her family? Complicating matters even more, the family moves from busy Manhattan to suburban Long Island, and Julie's sense of isolation goes into overdrive.

Koppelman nails every detail: the meandering mind of a depressive, the way Julie's thoughts pinball from one topic to another. And her visceral prose gets so deep inside the character and is so brutally honest that Julie's desperation is palpable. Threaded throughout, too, are hauntingly rendered memories of a childhood that's left its own set of scars. There's Julie's achingly lonely mother, determined to grab herself a new life and refusing to acknowledge Julie's problems. David, Julie's brother, has become a drugged-out college dropout, and his East Village life is in stark counterpoint to her privileged one. Most indelible is Julie's fly-by-night philandering father, a slippery charmer whose parental attentions to her come with a vaguely sinister edge.

At times relentless (I might have wished for a bit of Special's delicious, dark humor), A Mouthful of Air isn't always an easy read. Yet, as it builds elegantly, almost casually to the chilling and inevitable conclusion, I was transfixed.

In these rough times, some people may be popping feel-good books like party nuts, the equivalent of literary Valium, and yes, I reach for them, too, but sometimes it feels like too much of a good thing. Their very lightness floats away, and I start craving a substantial unhappy ending. A bad ending can feel as satisfying, as necessary to good literary health as a vitamin. My prescription? Take two of these dark jewels of books and call me in the morning.

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