All novels are influenced by other books, but few acknowledge this as openly — or as productively — as William Brewer’s “The Red Arrow.” The Stanford University lecturer’s first novel focuses on a troubled man whose intense reading experiences change his life. Even for a work of literary fiction, this is a notably bookish effort, a heady, inventive novel with intelligent things to say about mental illness, perception, creativity and psychedelic drugs.

布鲁尔的无名叙事者是一个33年-old artist and writer living in Oakland (where Brewer himself lives). Although he’s sold some paintings and published a story collection, he considers himself a flop — a hypercritical self-assessment that’s a symptom of a deeper problem. For 20 years, he’s been beset by depression, a condition he calls “the Mist.” When the Mist descends upon him, its “weight and pressure” induce “elaborate images of my suicide.”

虽然他认为他的第一本书,relative success helps the narrator land a contract for another, a novel about a deadly chemical spill in West Virginia, where he grew up. He researches the event but struggles to harness the novel’s plot. In his frustration, he seeks inspiration in a book about another sort of disaster — Michael Herr’s Vietnam War classic “Dispatches.” He reads — and rereads — Herr’s book, carrying it everywhere and annotating every page. In time, he becomes so intimidated by Herr’s capabilities that he’s unable to write his novel. “The book that I thought was a gift,” he writes of “Dispatches,” “was in fact a curse — classic doings of the Mist.”

Despite this professional catastrophe — and for reasons that remain obscure until an unconventional and altogether wonderful scene late in Brewer’s novel — the narrator is asked to ghostwrite an eminent physicist’s memoir. He doubts he can pull it off but agrees to try. Around the same time, his life is rerouted by his encounter with another book. This time it’s Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind,” the Berkeley journalist’s report on guides who use psilocybin and other psychedelics to help people suffering from various illnesses. Delighted to read that many of these guides are based in the Bay Area — “right where I was sitting,” the narrator notes — he decides to get in touch with one.

Most of the above unspools in flashback, which the narrator shares with us while seated on the Frecciarossa — “the red arrow” — a high-speed train line in Italy. There he intends to track down the physicist, who, after working with the narrator for a while, has become impossible to reach.

This novel works on numerous levels. The gradually revealed parallels between what the physicist calls his “breakthrough in perception” and the narrator’s quest to temper his psychological pain are at once thought-provoking and stirring. Meanwhile, Brewer’s depiction of depression — particularly the agony it causes the narrator’s wife, Annie — is heartrending. And he skillfully melds empathy and humor, as when the narrator learns that his father, desperate to preserve the past in West Virginia — “a no-place in the American mind,” the narrator calls it — has bought a going-out-of-business Blockbuster’s DVDs.

Brewer, too, deserves praise for what might be called narrative fortitude. For a novelist, it’s no easy task to successfully employ books as plot engines (the narrator also has meaningful experiences with writings by W.G. Sebald, Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Geoff Dyer). Nor is it an opportunistic path to surefire best-sellerdom. Rather, it’s the work of a confident writer who isn’t beholden to convention or market considerations.

Late in “The Red Arrow,” Brewer’s narrator confesses his doubts about artistic originality — does it even exist? This distinctive novel suggests that it does.

The Red Arrow
By William Brewer
(Knopf; 272 pages; $26)

Author event

City Lights Booksellers & Publishers presents William Brewer:Virtual event. 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 17. Free. Registration required.citylights.com/events