Is it possible to write about this country's decay and overreach without visiting its battlefields? Yes, it is. Just visit a veterans hospital, look in the foreclosure section of a newspaper or, as Victor LaValle has done in his powerful and crusading third novel, "The Devil in Silver," drop in to a mental health facility.
In the past three years, the United States has lost more than $3.4 billion in mental health care funding. Pepper, the hero of LaValle's book, learns what this has done to hospitals first-hand when he fights with three plainclothes New York City police officers and is involuntarily committed for a 72-hour hold in Queens.
The mood of Pepper's intake is part slapstick, part horror novel.
After debriefing, he meets a menagerie of characters -- a teenager compulsively pulling out all her hair, an elderly woman with a penchant for flashing new intakes. Not for a second does LaValle imbue them with romanticized insights.
The Devil in the book is part metaphor, part man. He's kept behind a silver door and stalks the halls at night, spooking residents like a gross manifestation of the fear of madness that LaValle's characters both possess and represent.
Daytime presents mundane real-world horrors. The hospital runs a computer system borrowed from a mortgage foreclosure company, one designed to cut people off from asking for help. "The tables and chairs were the kind of dining sets you might buy from a defense contractor."
Pepper, admitted on a technicality, winds up in a long-term stay. "We did keep you for a seventy-two-hour observation," his doctor explains to him. "But what we observed is that you needed more time with us. So we readmitted you, as an involuntary admit."
This is a long book, and the attention LaValle pays to detail becomes a kind of political statement. The tale doesn't rush, because its characters' lives do not get to -- their lives are eked out, one numbing routine at a time. Forced to sit still with them, one grows fond of their idiosyncrasies and suffers the length of their stay alongside them.
