Is Newt Nuts?

I spent last weekend absorbed in The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel about three Brown students in the early 1980s. The most captivating character in the book is the manic-depressive Leonard Bankhead and its most compelling passages depict the ravages of his illness. When he doesn't take his proper dose of lithium, Leonard becomes a superhero in his own mind, overflowing with self-confidence and charisma, before he inevitably crashes. Eugenides has protested, rather...