Seeing the World Through Books

“Reading was a problem the meds made it hard and also certain words were not as they appeared.  Light for example was girl and Kick was House but Kick was also Bed.  Up was Down and Hot was Cold et cetera.  Clocks were in degrees instead of hours.  I told time from the ice on the East River.”

Lowboy, John Wray’s third novel, is completely different from either of his past novels.  The Right Hand of Sleep (2001), his debut novel, was set in Austria in the years leading up to World War II and was the personal story of a man who had gone to the Ukraine to escape the horrors of World War I and then returned to Austria as Hitler was coming to power.  Canaan’s Tongue (2005) is set along the Mississippi River in 1863, the story of a Messianic preacher and others who engage in The Trade, selling slaves and then, with their collusion, recapturing them and reselling them, a novel of epic themes.  Lowboy is different still, the powerful and moving story of a paranoid schizophrenic teenager who is hospitalized for almost two years, and then, off his meds, escapes back to New York City’s subways in an effort to spread his “message” and prevent global warming from destroying life as we have known it.  Highly praised for both his imagination and his careful structuring, John Wray is one of the most exciting young novelists in the country today.

Will Heller, known as Lowboy, reveals in the opening sentences of Wray’s latest novel  that he is especially attuned to his sense impressions,  hearing the closing of the door of a subway car as “C# first, then A.  Sharp against both ears, like the tip of a pencil.”   He has escaped from the “school” he has been attending for two years because he knows that “the world’s going to die in ten hours, by fire,” and he is determined to do whatever he can to prevent this–first by losing his virginity.  He seems almost logical, though odd, as he begins to move through the subway system, gradually yielding to more and more bizarre behavior as time passes and his medications wear off.

Ali Lateef, a New York City detective whose area of expertise is “Special Category Missing,” is hoping that Will’s mother, “Miss Heller,” sometimes known as Violet, can provide enough information to allow him to find Will in the seven or eight hours before his lack of medication pushes him into violence, but she, too, has her problems.  Ironically, it is Will’s meds, as they wear off, which may be responsible for the hot flashes which convince him that global warming is an increasingly dire issue.

As Will travels the subways, he recalls stories his grandfather told him about an underground city beside the Musaquantas River, and, in fact, he finds a whole city underground when he follows a homeless woman named “Heather Covington” through the tunnels and into a “room” beneath a grate on the street, where he tries to seduce her.  He then decides to go above ground to look for  “Emily,” the only young woman he has ever been close to, a girl who seemed fond of him two years ago.  His lack of contact with reality is obvious, however, from the fact that he has been committed to his special “school” because, just two years past, he pushed Emily onto the tracks of the subway, narrowly missing the third rail.

Will’s complete inability to relate to the real world soon becomes even more obvious in a sad and moving scene in which he goes into a bakery to buy some cupcakes.  He is unable to decide exactly what he wants, unable to communicate in any way with the salesperson, and unable to understand how much to pay, even volunteering that he has $640 in his pocket.  When he finally gets his cupcakes, he opens the bag to “take out the machinery” which he believes is inside.

Wray writes an intense and moving novel which moves inexorably to its conclusion.  Will’s eight-hour decline into obvious psychosis is reflected gradually through Wray’s prose style, as it becomes more and more fragmented, lacking in punctuation and transitions, and less and less predictable.  Will’s relationships with his therapist and his teachers, with his mother, with Emily, and with a prostitute who shows up when he leaves the subway all confirm his lack of connection with the real world, yet the reader cares for him, and hopes for him, despite his increasingly distorted “logic” and the reader’s own inability to know how much to believe and how much to attribute to visions and voices.  The power of the novel increases exponentially as Will comes closer and closer to violence, however much he may desire to remain in control.  Carefully researched (and actually written while the author rode the subway every day), John Wray’s Lowboy is another milestone for Wray, a finely structured, beautifully composed novel of extreme psychological illness presented in a way which will touch the hearts of readers.

Notes: Also by John Wray, THE RIGHT HAND OF SLEEP and  CANAAN’S TONGUE.

The author’s photo appears on www.daylife.com and is an AP photo.

Darran Anderson has a “classic” interview with the author here:   http://dogmatika.wordpress.com

The old Union Square subway station photo is from Gothamist, as part of an article filled with the kinds of subway events that Lowboy would have understood.