“Edgewater was once a pretty normal ‘burb,” writes Drew Ballard, the narrator of Major Inversions. “Now, everyone you meet is in the process of becoming something.” This little seaside town has undergone some growing pains in the past couple of years. It is the suburb of what is becoming a burgeoning film town, the Hollywood of the eastern seaboard: Wilmington, North Carolina. It might not have Hollywood’s platinum sparkle, but movies get made in Wilmington, and everyone wants to get a break in the industry. As such, everyone in Edgewater has become something of a split personality: actor/bartender. Writer/caterer. Somebody/nobody.

Drew’s a musician/security guard, but that’s not even half of his identity crisis. Drew’s something of a de facto drug kingpin in the local entertainment circuit, though “kingpin” is a stretch. Basically, he just bribes club owners with drugs to sew up gigs for his cover band. Still, he seems to be everyone’s connection, and “kingpin” is just the kind of exaggeration Edgewater invites.

Drew’s status as a guitar god and womanizer (stage name: Jag) is an ephemeral trick of the night; without his glam wig and choreography, Drew’s just…Drew. In the daytime, he works as a security guard, watches football, and kills time with Barron, a socially inept graduate student and Drew’s hated roommate. Drew ridicules Barron without mercy, but clearly the validity of the source is to be questioned: in one scene, Drew casually picks up a telemarketer over the phone, which leads to a rendezvous. When the pair meet, Drew is so palpably disappointed with his date (and with himself) that the perfunctory sex he was jonesing for doesn’t even make it to a bedroom– they just get it over with in a parking lot.

When Drew is introduced to Layla through mutual acquaintance Barron, at first he resists the implication (Get it together, man!). Drew knows his life may not be perfect, but at least he knows how to hug the turns. But, soon enough, Drew and Layla find themselves drawn together anyway. She seems different somehow; she stirs dormant feelings in him. Is it love? Or maybe just the side effects of this alien expectation of fidelity? In any case, under her influence Drew’s life seems to stabilize. He lands a gig through Layla’s father scoring the music for a film by a first-time director. It seems a turning point, and he struggles to find focus and clean up his act— the expected course of action, he assumes, for a man on the cusp of a serious relationship. He succeeds about half of the time: not quite sure how to be an adult and too old to be a child, there is a defensive cunning to Drew that never relents. But it goes farther than being simply a tacked-on character trait; Drew was an adopted child. He is essentially rootless; a tree of no branches. What does he know how to be, other than a hyphenate?

Maybe family holds the answers he seeks. Maybe he needs to know his real identity in order to forge ahead in life with any sense of real purpose. Ever resistant to change, Drew at first dismisses the idea of looking for his birth parents. But by and by he again caves, and when the story’s over, it’s evident Drew should have listened to his instincts all along. Secrets lurk in the periphery of Drew’s waking life. Turns out being a drug dealing metal demigod was not such a bad gig.

Major Inversions is Highland’s first novel, and it’s got a high IQ and so many twists you’ll need a chiropractor. Full of clever prose, wicked humor and colorful characters, It’s a story about the precarious nature of human personalities, and how close we are to completely losing it. In fact, it has a couple of things going on at its core, the first being a somewhat sideways ode to hedonism: it’s only when Drew tries to get his shit together and become a responsible adult that his life truly jumps the rails for good. Is it karma coming to get him? In much the way the characters in Requiem for a Dream harbored delusions of grandeur that blew up in their faces, the Major Inversions triad— Drew, Layla and Barron— find themselves destroyed in one way or another by appetites that grew out of control. In Selby’s book, the wrecking drug was heroin; in Highland’s, the wrecking drugs are frighteningly ordinary: stability. Happiness. Normalcy. But further, the blame can’t be passed around to all the characters equally in Major Inversions. The main difference between the two sets of characters is that those in Requiem controlled their own fates. They made stupefyingly bad decisions and fell under their own avarice. In Major Inversions, the characters aren’t always at the controls; there is a puppeteer pulling the strings, so we can hardly blame those characters who find themselves broken at the story’s close– they just didn’t have the info required to save themselves. It’s almost draconian the way the architect of the book’s major disaster manipulates the lives of the others to satisfy a personal curiosity.

Aside from that, it’s a story of identity, or lack thereof. What fills the vacuum when we don’t know ourselves? When Drew loses himself to exterior forces, what does he become? Fantasy, usually. Edgewater’s a suburban town gone schizo– its citizens slave in day jobs to bankroll their illusions. Drew’s got issues; Layla’s an innocent falling into all the pitfalls parents fear for their daughters (and some they would utterly gasp to imagine); Barron’s an academic who has lost his way. But it’s Drew we follow. At his job as a security guard at a courthouse, Drew guesses the monetary worth of those who pass through the metal detectors he oversees. When everyone in town has got a dollar sign tattooed to their foreheads, it’s easy to let dreams of success and happiness mushroom out of control, growing into things we find hideous. Forget Chinatown; it’s Edgewater.

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