[In the following review, Miner lauds Brain Fever as "rewarding for that large population of us who have been both Catholic and crazy."]

Valerie Sayers's fifth book, Brain Fever, is a brilliantly agile road novel whose characters careen from small-town South Carolina to the wilderness of New York City. This witty, picaresque story is also a skillful, philosophical allegory about the lines between faith and madness.

Brain Fever opens on Holy Thursday as Tim Rooney, 45-year-old adjunct philosophy professor, medicated schizophrenic and practicing Catholic, is confronting a crisis of faith:

See here: I was never one who had to make a leap of faith—I sucked it in, with my mother's milk. When I was a boy I built shrines to Mary and never doubted that she smelled every wildflower I picked her and would shield me from the taunts of children who found flower picking unseemly…. I believed all through adolescence, all through the first sordid pokings of desire. I believed all through my secular philosophy studies, all through those loose days of the sixties, when we believers hooted at the Church's hilarious sexual pronouncements and thought the hierarchy had been invented for our amusement…. I was an anarchist Catholic junkie, O! I was an iconoclast pro religion in an age of disbelief. I believed as I went mad…. I still believed when I reentered sanity….

By the day after Easter, Tim has decided not only to abandon his church, but to dump his beloved fiancé, Mary Faith, and her young son, Jesse. He rejects Catholicism; Due East, S. C.; all family and friends. That fateful Monday, Tim gets up, shines his shoes, packs his bag, withdraws $15,000 from the bank, stuffs the bills into his socks, then drives slowly toward New York, scene of his student success at Columbia University and of happy—if conveniently reconstructed—memories.

Eccentric but credible characterization is the key to Sayers's success. Tim's manic, first-person narrative is rendered in the utterly genuine and sympathetic voice of a middle-age, failed academic with a generous heart who is losing his grip (once again) on sanity, perhaps on his very life. While Sayers conveys the pain Tim's dislocation, his story is oddly cheerful. Tim's messianic delusions—a cross between Don Quixote and Jesus Christ—are tempered with a wry consciousness about his often-ludicrous self-presentation. The story stays afloat on Tim's humor, intelligence and reckless optimism.

Driving north through Charleston, Tim spies an angel in the dark. The nocturnal hitchhiker is Angela Bliss, who is running away from an elaborate Southern wedding and the staid married life that will follow. Of course, she is heading to New York City. Meanwhile, back in Due East Mary Faith is beside herself with bitter worry. Father Berkeley. Tim's family priest, forms a search party with Mary Faith and Jesse. Through a series of reminiscences and flashbacks, readers learn the madcap and tragic history of the Rooney clan and, by extension, the quirky cultural lore of Due East.

Tim is one of five children of a radical Catholic activist mother with a conscience the size of the Atlantic Ocean. His father is violent and financially inept. One of his sisters commits suicide. Always troubled by mental illness, Tim's life has alternated between misadventures and pharmacological remedies. "[T]hat was my job, losing my mind. My mother couldn't go to a secular school, so I went. My mother couldn't love my father, so I did, when I could. My mother couldn't go crazy, so … They designate one of us in every family. I was the sacrificial son."

While Tim drives north with the young, lusty Angela, Mary Faith, Jesse and Father Berkeley form a very different kind of road troupe. Their journey transforms each of the bickering Samaritans. Particularly moving is Mary Faith's realization of why she loves the mad philosopher, and Jesse's progress from anxiety to anger to regained affection for Tim. Father Berkeley is convinced that in true Christian metaphor, Tim has subjected himself to exile in the wilderness (the uncivilized New York) and that they must find him within the proverbial 40 days or disaster will ensue.

Sayers humorously exposes the parochialisms and idiosyncrasies of both Due East and New York. Due East is a superficially cordial village, a town where Mary Faith lives her whole life next door to the Rooneys without feeling free to greet Tim's sister in the back yard. The New York scenes tellingly juxtapose surreal and stereotype: Tim's car is stolen the first night; he cowers from a bat flying around his subway compartment; he grooves at a cross-gender bar called Intergalactica; he gives away all his money to people sleeping in a park.

In some ways, Brain Fever is a wildly utopian novel, for Tim narrowly escapes through one net of grace to another. So nimbly does he evade death and assault that you begin to wonder if there is something holy about his innocence. Women always come to Tim's rescue: Angela finds him a New York sanctuary; he is nursed by a rich, white, Southern transplant in a grand SoHo loft; he's provided temporary haven by a tough-minded black school-teacher in a modest Brooklyn apartment. And, of course, there is Mary Faith, racing across the country to save him. The most engaging member of Tim's supporting cast is G. B. Brights, a young black man with dreadlocks and a worried face. G. B., a former student of Tim's from South Carolina whom he has forgotten about, just happens to be in New York, and he appears on the brink of several Rooney disasters to act as Tim's guardian angel.

One of Sayers's virtuoso moments is the scene in which a filthy, ragged, pajama-clad Tim lectures a tough crowd in Washington Square. What begins as a passionate homily about relieving Bosnian suffering gets twisted in Tim's mind as he invokes the spirits of actors Al Pacino and Florence Henderson. His listeners are drawn into rapt solidarity until his cock-eyed crusade is interrupted by the intercession of yet another set of angels:

"BOSNIA!" I would have gone on, I would have continued, I would have chanted FREE TIBET! and MOZAMBIQUE! and TIANANMEN SQUARE! So many souls to save.

The finish line of this geocultural romp is provocatively left undrawn—relegating Tim's romantic and professional future to readers' imaginations. The connections between his childhood apparition of the Virgin Mary and his more recent hallucinations about Florence Henderson remain tantalizingly opaque. In the end, faith—all kinds of faith (in humanity, in love, in God, in New York, in Due East)—saves the day, and Tim comes to understand that despair is the only state from which one can't be redeemed. Brain Fever is a novel with wide appeal and is particularly rewarding for that large population of us who have been both Catholic and crazy in our doubting lives.