Publisher's Weekly Book of the Day: Amy Koppelman's, A Mouthful of Air Suicide ideation. Sleeping the day away in a dark room. Feeling a general disconnection from the world. Being overwhelmed by mundane tasks. Paranoia. The many facets of depression have inhabited literary characters for centuries, from Electra to Esther Greenwood. We must wonder what will become of literature in the age of the psychotropic drugs: would Anna Karenina still be doomed if she'd had a vial of Zoloft at hand?

Amy Koppelman's debut, A Mouthful of Air (MacAdam/Cage, $23), poses, but doesn't attempt to answer, the question. Julie Davis, a 25-year-old Manhattanite and stay-at-home mother of one, is almost handling her post-suicide-attempt post-partum depression when she discovers she's pregnant again. But it's the '90s, before doctors and society began mixing anti-depressants with pregnancies, so Julie's Zoloft is taken away. The pregnancy placebo effect enables Julie to function just barely as she attempts communication with her (rather overconfident but sweet) husband, re-establishes a connection with her toddling Teddy and moves to Long Island with vain hopes that the lovely backyard pool won't become the gun on the mantelpiece.

Julie only pretends to take her pills after the baby comes, so less than a year after the first "accident" (as friends and family refer to it), Julie and little Rachel end the novel face-down in the water. (Note to those fond of full circles: Julie's failed wrist-slicing experiment occurs the day after her daughter's conception, so the tragic ending is a successful recreation of the events ante medias res.) This Andrea Yates-ing of literature is powerful. You can't blame Julie for her choices, when Koppelman is so effective at showing how incredibly difficult just changing a diaper can be to someone gripped by depression. But as it turns out, you can't blame anyone else, either. Her husband threw all his love and money at the situation. Her doctors gave the best counsel and care at their disposal. Even her scum of a father showed up to apologize for the incest in Julie's childhood.

A graduate of Columbia's MFA program, Koppelman was a young mother struck by Kurt Cobain's suicide and her first reading of Tolstoy when she began work on A Mouthful of Air. As such, Koppelman's less-than-cheery story draws heavily on personal experiences with depression and was written before the drownings in Houston made international headlines. The first-hand knowledge shows: the prose is terse but perfectly observed, each detail designed to capture a woman completely at odds with what the world expects her to feel. The facade of Julie shimmers with potential, while her interior life is a dull gray at best.

PW Forecasts called it "lean, minutely detailed and frighteningly convincing." It's also damn disturbing, but unmistakably worthwhile, as well."
--Melanie Danburg

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