[...] Reading "The Planet Trillaphon" I felt, for the first time, like I understood the vicious logic of real depression: how it feeds on and amplifies itself, establishes a closed loop between what D. T. Max terms "anxiety" and "the fear of anxiety." There's a bruised, frightened human heart at the center of "Trillaphon". A troubled little soldier. It creates a powerful irony--that this story, given over to a narrator who laments his inability to make others understand what he's going through, so effectively communicates his pain to us.