Novel features narcoleptic heroine

• By GREG LANGLEY
• books editor
• Published: Nov 16, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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It’s not often you encounter a character with narcolepsy in literature. Narcolepsy is a neural disorder that causes its sufferers to suddenly fall asleep, and an attack can be triggered by stress, laughter, anger, anything. The heroine of Penelope Przekop’s book Aberrations (Emerald Book Co., $14.95 softcover, 241 pp.) is indeed a narcoleptic.

Even worse, Angel Duet suffers from catalepsy, a condition in which the sufferer is awake but paralyzed in an apparent catatonic state. She’s under plenty of attack-triggering stress too. Angel lives with her father, lawyer Frank Duet, and his recently moved-in girlfriend, Carla, a wise aleck lawyer.

Angel’s life is a mess. Besides her disabilities, she had the burden of carrying on an affair with a Mac, a married doctor at the hospital where she works part-time. She’s a student in her senior year of college and she has another job, working at the LSU Ag Center in Shreveport because her doctor and father feel it will be good for her.

“They hoped the nature of the work and the sunshine, along with a new regimen, would somehow give my body a jump-start. As they discussed the possibilities, I imagined I’d be like the turtle I found in our yard as a kid. I’d painted its back white in hope of finding it again. I worried that they’d need to tag me so I could be found at the end of the summer. As the doctor scribbled down my new prescription, my father just smiled at me like he had for the last twenty years, kind of sad but hopeful. I smiled back, guessing the turtle with the white back was dead now.”

So Angel winds up chasing bugs in a cotton field as part of a study of pesticide effectiveness. While on this job, she works with Tim, a gay man, and Kimmie, a 26-year-old virgin. Soon she is embroiled in their problems and is going to a Shreveport gay bar called the Blue Flower. Angel meets Scarlett, a beautiful lesbian girl, and has a gay fling.

You might be tempted to think these problems were enough, but the real underlying issue with Angel is her mother. Her father has told her that her mother died when she was born, but Angel longs for her mother’s affection and tries to figure out what her mother was like by studying a collection of photographs that her mother took before she died.

This is clearly a book that is accurately titled, full of domestic conflict, romances gone awry and immature behavior. Yet it’s compelling. Angel is flawed, but interesting. If Przekop has one glaring fault, it’s her tendency to put too much in a short book. She has enough complications in Angel’s story to fuel two or three bigger books.

Some of those issues don’t get resolved, but the major ones do. Some of the plot turns are a bit predictable, and the ending is somewhat abrupt. The dialect is sometimes stilted, especially some of the exchanges between Angel and Frank, as when they have a deep conversation about what it is Angel wants, and she tries to tell Frank what she’s looking for —

“ ‘I keep think’ maybe I can find it somewhere.’

“ ‘It?’

“ ‘That mother feelin’.

“ ‘Maybe what you need can be found, but you’ve got to start lookin’ out, away from this house, away from me. Away from those photographs.’ He flung his arm out from beneath the canopy as if pushing something away, something invisible. ‘I tried to give you that feelin’. His arms went limp into his lap and his head fell into his hands. ‘I made a lot of decisions I’m still not sure about.’”

The book makes its point though.