Mixed Nuts

A single mother trapped in a London loony bin tries to prove she's sane.

(Julia Ewan - Twp)

POPPY SHAKESPEARE

A Novel

By Clare Allan

Bloomsbury. 341 pp. $23.95

Mad, mad, mad -- we're obsessed with the mad. We sit hunched over, chit-chattering to ourselves about them, averting our glistening eyes while sucking down an endless stream of madness-themed movies and books. But don't let asylum-fatigue stop you from reading Poppy Shakespeare . With her debut novel, Clare Allan proves herself a modern mythologist, here to tell a fantabulous fairy tale of the insane.

The story is set in a North London mental hospital and narrated by a 29-year-old woman who speaks in the kind of profanity-laced street slang that briefly baffles before it becomes completely transparent. You'll want to hold on to these few solid facts because, once past them, you're afloat in the shifting, distorted world of the mentally ill.

Enter the Abaddon Unit, a tower that "gone up so high you couldn't see the windows and it kept going up until all you could see was this faint red line disappearing into the clouds. . . . The way it worked at the Abaddon was the madder you was, the higher you gone." Our guide, N., is strictly first floor, a patient at "the Dorothy Fish," Abaddon's psychiatric day hospital. In the deeply bizarre, absurdly believable world of the Dorothy Fish common room, madder is better and being discharged is akin to death. Here, N. is on solid footing, being a double legacy on the suicide front. " I been a dribbler since before I was born. Been fostered out fifty-three times. . . . Self-harming since the age of two. Tried to top myself at fourteen." Proud, she is.

N. and her 20-odd fellow patients have their own complex calculus of just how crazy you need to be to keep your coveted slot at the Dorothy Fish, and they adjust their wardrobes, body odors and behaviors accordingly. They also have their own stock market: Banker Bill will give you five butts for "Phlegyapam" (whatever that is), but it'll cost you 20 butts to buy it back (rates are subject to change, but then, you do get a receipt.) They have their own vocabulary, too: It's strictly dribblers versus flops here, and both against the sniffs (which group, if you're reading this, you likely belong to).

Disrupting this world is Poppy Shakespeare, an attractive single mother admitted against her will who disrespectfully insists she's sane and insanely wants out.

Poor, poor sane Poppy. The story of her quest to convince the staff of her mental health intersects with the pressure the institution is feeling from the Minister of Madness to privatize. "Results, results, results," complains one patient. "This government's obsessed with results!" Modern psychiatry ("It's sort of like science," N. tells Poppy) comes in for some rough satire. The wine-drinking, salmon-eating staff hardly figure here, leaving patients to devise their own treatment plans. So the guy who is supposed to be bulking up with Nutri-drinks trades them to Fat Florence in exchange for her appetite suppressants. The Patients' Rights office -- which has a six-month waiting list -- is staffed by a former patient working on a two-legged desk in an abandoned toilet. Catch-22 memos announce: "1. If clients wish to attend, groups are voluntary. 2. If clients do NOT wish to attend, groups are NOT voluntary."

The crazy, dark humor becomes that much darker, the message that much more confusing, when we learn that Allan herself spent nearly a third of her life in psychiatric care.

If you finish Poppy Shakespeare knowing definitively which characters belong in a mental hospital and which don't, you're saner than I. ?

Claudia Deane is a Washington Post staff writer.