The most interesting thing in Derek Owusu’s third novel is the building it is named for. The Recovery House — reviewed in the Guardian by Emma Loffhagen — opens with Jamal, a young novelist, waking in a residential recovery house after a breakdown. He has overdosed, is an alcoholic, and has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. He arrives frazzled and frantic, less interested in getting better than in reconstructing how he got there. Owusu spent a summer in a recovery house himself after a mental health crisis, and the novel is unusually close to the grain of the place.
What the house actually is
A recovery house is the residential alternative to hospital admission, and the review is sharpest on the difference. The building is not a sanctuary in any conventional sense: Jamal gets “a single bed with protruding springs, dead cockroaches in the nightstand and restless corridors in which people in various states of distress move around one another.” He watches the nurses; the nurses watch him.
What forms there is not therapy in any designed sense. It is, in Loffhagen’s phrase, “a strange, fragile ecosystem for Jamal’s convalescence” — shared cigarettes, other people’s dramas, a slow emergence from himself. The thing it offers that a ward cannot is the company of people who already know how close collapse sits: “Who was well in the world anyway?” one resident asks, concluding “there was only the sick and those who didn’t realise it yet.”
The work that made him ill
Writing is both Jamal’s vocation and his condition. Like Owusu, he has published two books and won an award for his first; the expectations around the third become unbearable, and he comes to remember that the attempt to write it is what precipitated the breakdown. His formulation is the book’s spine: “the thing that inspired me is the thing that’s trying to kill me.”
Publishing takes a beating along the way — “why does everyone in this industry want something from you even though we’re all very aware that things usually take time.” And the staff withhold pen and paper from Jamal for fear of what writing will provoke, a prohibition the novel spends its length arguing with.
A song, a friendship, an invitation
An author’s note asks the reader to listen to the Cranberries’ Zombie two to four times before going past the first page. Dolores O’Riordan’s refrain — “What’s in your head?” — becomes the question Jamal asks in various forms throughout the book.
The woman in the room below him, Joy, sings the chorus at night until he finds himself singing it too. She slides a pen and paper under his door — the thing the nurses refused — and the two begin a weekly Bible study together. Faith here is “not cruel or exacting,” and the friendship is tender and platonic rather than romantic; between the two of them the song’s question turns “from a fear into an invitation: tell me.”
What the book is asking
At 160 pages it is a very small book about some very large questions: what separates illness from inspiration, when self-examination slips into self-destruction, whether turning a life into art is also a way of exploiting it. Owusu writes in long, free-flowing sentences with sparse punctuation and no chapter markings — the rhythm of a poem, one thought spilling into the next before it can be contained, which is roughly how the states he is describing behave.
It is worth being clear about what this is: a novel, and a review of one, not evidence about how recovery houses work, how many exist, or what they achieve. Its claim is narrower and more durable — that the line between reflection and self-erasure is porous, and that the people on the wrong side of it are not a separate kind of person. Loffhagen calls the book a uniquely honest meditation on art, religion and mental health, at times “almost painfully raw, reading like an excavation of the soul of a writer wondering whether, in turning his life into art, he has also been exploiting it.”