“Lowboy” by John Wray (book review)
John Wray’s Lowboy (2009) follows its main character — a schizophrenic 16-year-old — on a wild ride reminiscent of the one in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in its emotional intensity and raw subjective vision, as well as its literal descent into the New York underground. Wray executes the jittery thought patterns of a schizophrenic with almost frightening skill — the book’s early chapters are so potent they verge on destabilizing, if you have any acquaintance with mental stress and the New York subway. Alternating chapters from the point of view of the sick boy and his anguished mother, Wray emphasizes both the inviolate solitude of subjectivity and a sense of permeable boundaries that threaten to give way at any time. (I did say destabilizing.) But the novel also is charming, partly due to its off-kilter, jazzy writing and partly to its generosity of vision. This book is about love — the love of an unconventional mother and son, the unrealistic love of a stranger for another, the bloom of young romance — all wrought by a writerly intelligence that allows you to puzzle and mourn over the characters the same way they do over each other. And if full-blooded characters you see and care about sounds like an old-fashioned virtue (think of DeLillo’s enigmas) it seems, in Wray’s hands, like one that deserves to be brought back.
At the center of the novel is Will (“Lowboy” of the title), just escaped from a psychiatric hospital where he’s been for the past 18 months and beginning his spontaneous odyssey of the New York subway system. The writing has a daring, elegant playfulness in the sections devoted to Will. The people he meets in the subway are nearly as eccentric as he is — at least, as seen through his eyes — and their responses to him as idiosyncratic. In a magical section, he is befriended by an obese homeless woman called Heather Covington and almost has sex with her (he is trying to lose his virginity) in her lair deep within the tunnels of the subway. The sense of fractured minds groping toward this strange coupling is wondrous and sad.
Part of the tenderness of the novel arises from the kind treatment Will receives from his raggedy companions — there’s an “honor among thieves” code among them. Heather Covington doesn’t try to get the $20 bill Will finds on the subway platform, for instance, even though Will doesn’t seem to want it either. To people preoccupied with electric interior worlds, money is only so interesting. And the Sikh he meets early on protects Will from a police officer on the subway train, even though his own safety is in danger. People instinctively seem to want to help Will, which increases the reader’s solicitousness toward him, too.
Wray conveys the appeal of Will’s mother, Violet, almost as strongly. A believably indifferent beauty, with nicotine-stained fingers, orthopedic shoes, and close-cropped blonde hair, Violet is a convincing portrait of a New York bohemian. The attraction between Violet and Detective Lateef has a whiff of TV plotting, but Wray does a good job of making their unlikely closeness transcend its conventional trappings. Lateef’s crush on Violet ends up forming another channel of subjectivity to view situations through, and this becomes a powerful theme of the book. Love, after all, can interfere with our common sense almost as strongly as mental illness, and Lateef’s response to Violet is a convincing depiction of the way we process certain pieces of information and not others about people we’re strongly attracted to.
Eventually, the theme of separate solitudes becomes the defining one in the novel. For all the affection in the story, more resonant is the unbridgeable gulf between even the most loving people. Even Will and Violet, who love each other fiercely, can only guess what is going on in the other. But isn’t that the way it should be, too? It’s suggested that at several points Violet went too close to Will. There is a lot of rather hazy information about her mothering being somehow implicated as a cause of Will’s illness, which is one of the book’s flaws — that idea is never worked through. There are a few other smoking guns that never go off, too — the reader expects more to be revealed at the end than is. But that doesn’t significantly detract from the book’s dazzling performance.
Lowboy has a classically suspenseful plot — Will is off his meds and dangerous, so finding him is an urgent matter. Lateef and Violet try to anticipate his movements before he hurts someone or himself, but their motives are different — Lateef is in simple pursuit, but Violet wants to protect her son as much as catch him. Her divided loyalty is poignant and causes some nice narrative jolts to the plot. Will’s mission, as mentioned before, is to lose his virginity, and he seeks out Emily, a girlfriend who he previously pushed onto the subway tracks — the incident that landed him in the hospital. True to the way characters respond to Will, Emily is wary of Will but not closed to him, and soon, not wary either.
There is something a little disappointing about Emily-and-Will after the brilliance of the other characters — their sections feel more like indie movie clichés than the funhouse-mirror atmosphere of the underground sections. Their passages are still rendered with great intelligence, but Emily is the least realized character in the story — she feels a little generic. However, the situation these two end up in is riveting: Emily is moved by love and lust to see Will as sick but not dangerous, while he’s moved by the same things to an edge of extreme behavior that’s completely terrifying.
If all this sounds a bit sensationalist, Wray’s prose is inspired enough to trouble the surface slickness of the story. Here is Will registering a train’s arrival in the station:
The train came in as hard as the ghost train before it, knocking the wind flat. and paving it over with sound. First the hissing of the current, then the shrieking of the wheelheads, then the champing of the brakepads in their sockets. There was no hearing anything else. If objects on the platform were trembling now it was with the force of the slackening cars, not because of the falseness of the world.
This is Will’s mind working — a seductive voice, bridging practical and apocalyptic concerns in one swoop, and earning our respect for its intensely detailed and poetic response to the world.
By the end you feel the same awe and fear for this desperate kid that you’d feel for someone comparable in your own life. But you can’t help respecting Will’s tortured mind, too, with its own fierce logic. The truth is you feel close to the same anguished love for him that Violet does, and that’s a pretty staggering achievement by Wray. Does creating vivid characters and making you care about them sound commonplace? It’s not — it’s virtually a lost art — and there’s very little else that’s commonplace in this remarkable book. Maybe its greatest achievement is being about a pathology that doesn’t seem directly inspired by personal experience — Wray, one learns on reading about him, has never been mentally ill, but the question isn’t idle. The book feels so personal as to be alive in your hands.
