They lived next door when you were growing up, they shared a dorm room with you in college, they now live upstairs from your apartment, ceaselessly typing and smoking pot with the dismal expectation that the high will stimulate their plodding prose. Her name is Monica Drake, she lives in Portland, Oregon and, like Kafka, she spends her days in the financial world and her nights producing great fiction. Though most of Monica's work has appeared in worthy literary journals like the Threepenny Review , it is her first novel, Silverfish in the Rete Mirabile , that will make her name. Nita wants to live with Trout, to be closer to him, but like all the things we desire in this world he is very slippery, indeed he is fish slippery. Certainly, Nita has problems, but they are not the sort of problems a hospital can quantify or remedy.
People grow anxious when they spend too much time alone.
What the social worker and the state fail to understand is, Nita's sudden plunges into insanity, her vertiginous spells, her inexplicable heart attacks, represent the condition of art itself, which is an extreme sensitivity to the world of things. This is what lies at the center of Monica's book, and why Nita's sickness is the source of the best passages.