LatinosUSA

El miedo a ser como los demás (Distrito 93), Javier Vidal’s second novel, draws its strength from emotional vulnerability: mental illness as an everyday landscape, friendship as both a lifeline and a burden. Within this terrain appears the double mirror of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen—not as a literary ornament, but as two real presences whose relationship, built on admiration, distance, affection, and friction»—, allows the novel to explore what it means to compare oneself, to disappoint, to try to save someone and fail. The book understands that writing about mental illness is not a matter of dramatizing it, but of observing how it seeps into conversations and quietly reshapes affection without the need for grand gestures.

At times, however, the novel folds so far inward that it risks circling around itself. The voice is powerful, yet sometimes becomes trapped in its own inner music, repeating nuances and losing momentum. The secondary characters—always orbiting around Wallace and Franzen—could have claimed more space, more contradiction, more rough edges. When the book opens its windows and lets the outside world in, the narrative breathes. And moves forward.

Even so, what ultimately holds the novel together is its underlying honesty: it idealizes neither pain nor friendship, and it portrays Wallace and Franzen as complex men shaped by their limits, desires, and fears. The book sheds light on the difficulty of caring for someone who is breaking, on the guilt of the one who remains, on the terror of becoming what one most tries to escape. Its greatest virtue is precisely that: fragility is not disguised, and humanity is not simplified. It’s a story that stays close to the reader, that accompanies without overwhelming, that looks without judging, and that reminds us that even in helplessness and comparison, there is always some small, stubborn way to keep going.