Ned Quinn has schizophrenia. He responds to a personal ad in a magazine placed by Jennifer Duncan. He has a job as a teacher in a big city. She lives in the outback, part of a small valley community. They write articulate, passionate letters to each other. He visits her. They fall in love. They suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous prejudice against the mentally ill. Everyone in the valley knows everyone else’s business. People make life hard for Jennifer and Ned, and he does not respond well to that sort of tension. They go through some rough patches, and discover some unexpected allies.

The plot is straightforward. Occasionally, when Ned or other characters are explaining some aspects of schizophrenia, the writing becomes a little schoolbookish, but those passages are kept to a minimum. For the most part, the writing is functional, not at all flowery. It’s an easy read, since chapters are fairly short and quite a lot happens to keep the storyline moving.

Usher tries to get into the head of Ned while he is having psychotic episodes. It’s a brave attempt, and although I have no way to judge how accurate or representative it is, I can’t say that it seemed particularly convincing. Indeed, all the characters seem just a little psychologically flat. Although this is a very subjective reaction, I didn’t really feel as if I understood the main characters deeply. (These days I read many more memoirs of mental illness than novels, as I generally find real life more gripping and interesting. But that’s not to say that a novel doesn’t have its own advantages. For one thing, a novel isn’t confessional, as nearly all memoirs are.)

The main point that gets emphasized again and again in Florid States is that there are so many destructive and ill-informed prejudices against the mentally ill, especially schizophrenics. Ned is not a danger to others, and he is capable of both giving and receiving the deepest love. He is also one of the smartest and most creative people in the novel. He doesn’t deserve the treatment he gets.

I came across Florid States in one of the airport bookshops while I was waiting for a plane back to New York at the end of a trip to Britain. I was on the hunt for possibly interesting books that I wouldn’t find in the US. It turns out that Usher’s novel was first came out in Australia in 1990, but has just been published in Britain, and is due out soon in the US. Better late than never, this book is worth reading.

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