Lowboy

Lowboy
by John Wray
p. 2009

I picked this book up on a whim and although I have mixed feelings about it on the whole, I’m extremely glad I did because I think I may have discovered a new writer to look out for in John Wray.

Lowboy is the story of 16-year-old William Heller—a paranoid schizophrenic nicknamed Lowboy—after he escapes from a mental institution where he has been kept since an incident with his girlfriend, Emily, a year previous. Will takes to the New York subway system—the scene of his fateful episode with Emily, who later joins him on his journey as he tries to ‘stop the world from ending.’ Will is a man on a mission; he holds all the answers but none of them make sense to the people in his orbit, not even to his worried and troubled mother, Violet, Will’s sole family member and the one who is closest to understanding his condition.

Lowboy also tells Violet’s story as she alternately collaborates and collides with Ali Lateef, a missing persons investigator determined to track down Will before he does something violent, for Lateef is sure the boy is a powder keg waiting to explode and that Violet is keeping secrets from him. Violet is not so sure of her son’s ill intentions, and insists on tagging along with the detective to ensure her the boy’s safe return home.

There are some twists and turns in this novel. The revelation about Violet was not particularly surprising to me, as there was plenty of evidence in the language that she was hiding something. I also saw the ending coming, but it didn’t make it any easier. I have a hard time figuring out what Wray was trying to accomplish with this ending. It’s so stark and devastating and really tough to crack for someone who doesn’t think like Will Heller. I would have come away from this book wondering ‘what’s the point?’ but one quality keeps me coming back to the positive side:

I am absolutely in love with John Wray’s character descriptions. The novel had a tendency to meander, but Wray’s language repeatedly brings you back to the center, grounds you in the moment. I could so perfectly picture every movement and interaction of Violet and Lateef and Will and Emily and in a book where dialogue was often a riddle, body language is so important. Even his descriptions of the New York subway system—so lovingly vivid—helped give the novel an identity by making the subway a character in itself. For someone like myself who hyperfocuses on characters and dialogue, everything in Lowboy resonated for its realness. I may not understand what Wray’s overall intentions with this novel were, but his writing style is enough to keep me coming back for more. Sadly, he only has three novels to his name, so there is not a whole lot more to come back to, but I anticipate them all the same.

What Would Jesus NOT Do?

Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk
p. 2001

Choke is the second novel I’ve had the pleasure to read by Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, so I sort of knew what I was getting myself into going in. Palahniuk’s quintessential pièce de résistance might have been enough to give the me a starting impression, but now I’m convinced the author has a type: stories about damaged losers who find themselves entrenched in incomprehensible situations of their own design. Like Fight Club, it’s a non-linear first person narrative, but this narrator has a name—Victor Mancini—and his problems are a little more of this world, specifically, of the flesh. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. When he’s not attending sex addiction meetings, he’s usually at work, unenthusiastically reenacting medieval times amongst his coworkers and friends, mostly burnouts and addicts themselves, or he’s having sex with various women (and for such a short, terse narrative, Palahniuk sure doesn’t spare the reader all the lurid details).

But Victor has another addiction, and it’s this one that really sets him up to fail. Victor’s mother—his only familial connection in his 20-odd years on this planet—is wasting away in an asylum that Victor cannot afford on his own, so to make ends meet, Victor has become a con artist. His art? Choking on food in restaurants every night to force complete strangers to save his life. I’ll admit, I had a hard time believing that this sordid hobby would actually yield monetary reward, but according to Victor, having people save his life creates a lifetime bond between the savior and himself as well as giving the stranger a sort of hero complex that makes him or her feel responsible for Victor. He then uses that bond to write to the would-be heroes, and make himself out to be so pathetic that they feel compelled to give him money. I still have a hard time buying this plot point, but I guess I’ll never really know if it will work. In any case, suspension of disbelief is something I came armed with going into a Palahniuk novel.

Our author—and by extension, Victor Mancini himself—wants us to believe that Victor is a terrible person. It is, in fact, the first thing we are told at the beginning of the book, right after being told we’re wasting our time reading it. There is certainly a lot of evidence to support that, and Victor goes to great lengths to convince us and himself of its truth, and yet I just couldn’t buy it. Maybe it’s the natural need to find something sincere or relatable about main characters—a coping mechanism to get through a piece of fiction, a response conditioned into us for the history of the written word until postmodernism came along. Maybe it’s a gut reaction to not believe anything Chuck Palahniuk says. Or maybe Victor Mancini really isn’t such a bad guy after all.

I suppose whether or not you like Victor really just depends on what type of person you are. I could easily see people despising him for all the right reasons. Hell, if I met Victor Mancini in real life, I’d probably not get along with him either, but in character form, I find him more sympathetic. It’s his complicated relationship with his mother that got me. No matter how many times Palahniuk describes the adolescent Victor as a “stupid little ratfink crybaby twerp” or a dickwad or a sucker, my heart went out to him every time he went back to his disturbed mother and took himself away from a healthy life. The kid never stood a chance, and his method of coping as an adult—theatrically risking his life in public to get some any kind of a loving reaction towards him from strangers—is so pathetic and masochistic that I still feel for him, even though I know he’s an adult now and should technically know better. Perhaps I’m just a sucker, another sap that Victor would easily manipulate if he got me in the place he wanted me, but I do find Victor sympathetic. It doesn’t help that the book proceeds to draw some crafty, if far-fetched parallels between him and Jesus Christ himself. That sort of manipulation is less Victor Manicini; but it is all Chuck Palahniuk.

Though Choke follows similar storytelling patterns as Fight Club—a narrator who is a little disturbed, who finds himself launched into bizarre hostile circumstances far out of his control, who tells it like it is, even if it’s not very politically correct—the book, on the whole, ends a much more positive note. I’d be interested to check out more Palahniuk novels next year, to see if my theories about his philosophy are true, or if I just happened to pick two very similarly-styled books.

Blood, Sweat, and Semen: That's What Southern Boys Are Made Of

Bad City Blues
by Tim Willocks
p. 1991

Somewhere down south in a stale, sweaty bayou-adjacent Louisiana slum, a bunch of dudes engage in neo-noir charades and Tim Willocks wants us all along for the ride.

Bad City Blues is a story about some troubled men and dark family secrets and a suitcase full of stolen money and duplicitous women and any other things you’d expect from a noir-style story set in an unnamed southern city. It took a few chapters for me to get into because at first, all I could think was that this was essentially the equivalent of a romance novel, but for men. There is a lot of smut I wasn’t expecting, and it’s certainly not of the sensual, passionate variety typically found in romance novels, but rather angry, lustful sex full of self-loathing and confusion. In fact, every woman in the story has at least three sexual partners and you can bet that if one comes up in story, it will be only a paragraph or two before she’s sexualized.

The inherent misogyny in the fact that the only female characters in Bad City Blues are either sluts or prostitutes would unnerve me, but I had a really hard time taking Willocks seriously. The melodrama, the clichés, and the extreme alpha-ness of every male character in this novel were just too much for me. It felt more like overcompensation than anything. That doesn’t make the misogyny okay, it just set my brain straight to interpret this novel, which is nothing more than a blustery homage to noir fiction.

It can be fun, if you learn not to take it seriously. The characters are intense and their interaction is layered. I’ve never personally read an Elmore Leonard novel, but if his novels are anything like they are depicted in the series “Justified,” then I am wont to compare Willocks to Leonard, because reading this book felt a lot like watching an episode of “Justified,” from the antihero with a tortured past and a penchant for femme fatales, to the bumbling criminal lackeys, to the explosive and fatal finale when everything comes together.

Willocks may have a way with language and dialogue, and it was refreshing to read a story centered around characters rather than concepts, after reading so much pulp science fiction lately, but I won’t be delving into his limited repertoire any further. While I love the neo-noir genre, I can probably root out a few that don’t feel like I’m reading pornography for people who hate women.