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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very different reading experience, August 26, 2008
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Summary, no spoilers:
This novel is about a young woman named Trace Pennington, who is at the top of her class at a small 4 year college. We know she is smart, beautiful, and mentally ill - she is the ultimate unreliable narrator.
Throughout the pages of this beautifully written novel, we find out that Trace has had a horribly abusive childhood, although we are never sure of just what happened because we are hearing about this from her point of view. What we learn of her past is dreamlike, and in fact it's often hard to distinguish fact from fantasy.
Trace (who makes up the name Ianthe), meets and falls in love with her college professor, a much older man with a mysterious past and secrets of his own. With him in her life, she learns how to face some of the horrors from her past.
This was a very different kind of reading experience for me. The writing was gorgeous, and evocative, and I came away feeling like I had truly entered the mind of a person who suffers from psychosis - which in turn left me feeling somewhat disorientated.
Because you learn the facts filtered through Trace, it's hard to know what is real and what's not, and for that reason, this book may not be for everyone. I do not recommend this book to those who like their mysteries neatly resolved, or dislike novels that employ stream of consciousness.
Recommended, with the reservations expressed above.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mythic, pyschotherapeutic, surreal, and obtuse, September 12, 2008
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There is a certain type of reader who doesn't mind so much what he reads about so long as it's well written. I'm not quite there, but I certainly can appreciate the fluidity of this author's prose. The cover is full of quotes about her genius etc., however, and, well, I'm not quite there either.
The plot, such as it is, concerns a college psych student, I think, who is more brilliant than the other students and most of the professors, I think. She has a sister who's messed up on meth, I think, and a best friend whose husband beats her. I think.
The problem is that the novel "Iodine" continuously slips in and out of dream states, journal entries, delusions, and reality. I think. There is so much slippage that it's hard to tell. The writing is peppered with references to mythological characters and the fathers of modern psychoanalysis....well, not so much peppered as smothered.
For me it's all too much. Now, if you are a female college student who has been taken with the study of same, this book may be right up your alley. For me it was a struggle to finish, and the payoff (did that really happen or was she delusional again?) not worth the ride. But I'll give you this: Her command of the language is a wonderful thing to behold. If only it meant something....
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34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Iodine (an element which does not naturally occur in the free state), September 6, 2008
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Trace (a faint copy, a minute amount) Pennington is also Ianthe (violet, handmaiden of Persephone, the pure soul visited by Queen Mab) Covington, and both are brilliant and mad, in the classical literary Bertha Rochester madwoman-in-the-attic sense. Trace is fleeing a horrific childhood, and as Ianthe, she falls in love with her professor, Jacob (who labored fourteen years to win the woman he loved) Matthias. But her carefully constructed world is slowly unraveling, and we the readers must try to follow Trace/Ianthe through the labyrinth of her own mind as past and present interweave themselves, until one pulled thread threatens to topple the entire structure. (Could I have mixed one more metaphor in there?)
Other reviewers have gotten caught up in trying to separate what is "real" and what is Trace's psychosis, to figure out what "really" happened to her. I think this is missing the point; in a sense, everything in the book - every fantasy, every hallucination, every dream, every strange visitor in the night - "happened." Sure, some of them only happened in the far reaches of Trace's troubled mind, in the locked closet of Bluebeard's to which only she holds the key, while some of them took place in the outside, observable world. So what? You could try to parse out past from present, physical from psychical, all day long - and you probably won't be able to stop yourself from trying - but insofar as this is Trace's story, her perceptions and her experiences are what matters.
Now, that's not to say that you can just accept everything at face value here. Obviously, Trace is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and it is, on some level, important to try to peel back the layers of metaphor with which she has constructed her own reality. Thus, when she abandons her dog to go live with Jacob, she's not really "abandoning" her "dog." And when her childhood friend claims to have been abducted and impregnated by aliens, it's not really her "friend" who was taken by "aliens." Part of the joy of this book is piecing together the connections Trace makes in her own mind, the way she incorporates psychoanalytic theory, Jungian symbols, literary allusions, and a hundred other tiny references into a long and complicated narrative which she calls her own life.
Did I mention that Trace/Ianthe is brilliant? Another of the thrills of "Iodine" is the way, as Ianthe, she quietly skewers the pretentious, self-absorbed culture of academia. Some passages were so wickedly funny they made me snort my free-trade organic soy milk double-caff latte all over my copy of "The Chalice and the Blade." Her descriptions of a stuffy psych prof and a women's studies guru are spot-on. Ianthe may be crazy, but she ain't stupid, as the saying goes. And the irony of a young women suffering from mental illness who is obsessed with the works of Jung and Hillman - even to the point of incorporating their theories into her delusions - is delicious.
Normally I can't stand books that are essentially novel-length character studies. But "Iodine" was so fascinating, so complex, that upon finishing the final page I immediately turned back to the beginning and read it again. This is one of those too-rare books that will probably never stop yielding up surprises, that will only get richer and deeper with each subsequent reading. "Iodine" is not for everyone, but I for one loved it.
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