Style Forces Substance Underground

John Wray, author of the new and notable “Lowboy,” has not had an easy way as a novelist. He wrote his debut, 2001’s “The Right Hand of Sleep,” in a tent in the basement of a Brooklyn warehouse, where he would by-now-famously listen to rats copulate. For his second book, 2005’s “Canaan’s Tongue,” he did his publicity tour by raft down the Mississippi in a (failed) attempt to get people to notice him. New York Times writer David Carr even tagged along for a stretch, and the book couldn’t sell 3,000 copies.

I want to say this up front: I like “Lowboy.” It’s a good book. There was something about the quote I’m about to give you from Carr’s Times piece, though, that when I read it just felt true. He said—and here’s the quote—“It is, in all, a thoroughly modern, calculated public relations enterprise, but its ancient charms are remarkable.” That’s just it: “Lowboy” is an incredibly competent novel from a young, clearly passionate writer. I want it to succeed. I want him to succeed. But it doesn’t have the feeling of a breakthrough.

The titular “Lowboy” is William Heller, a 16-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who goes off his meds and goes on a manic journey through the New York City subway system. The contemporary subject-matter is a departure for Wray, whose last two novels have taken place in pre-war Austria and the antebellum South. He told New York Magazine that the more palatable setting pick “had something to do with wanting to survive as a writer. Sooner or later it would be nice if I could make my publisher some money.” It’s not that “Lowboy” belongs at a supermarket checkout counter, but the more I read the more I realized he was telling me things I already knew. A great novel is magical—this was more like an eerily accurate palm reading, skillfully executed and titillating in its own way, but content to keep out of the great beyond.

For instance, Wray flexes all of his considerable writerly muscle getting into Will’s schizoid mind and voice— obviously disturbed and yet disarmingly intelligent, with a palpable vein of violence in his otherwise gentle personality—but the fact that the character is mentally ill does half of his dirty work for him. There is no need to drum up sympathy for a teenager with schizophrenia, even if he did throw his best friend onto the subway tracks.

“It was hot in the station,” Will explains to said friend. “You’d gone flat, playing tricks, not like Emily at all. I wanted to cool down. I wanted to take my clothes off. Then you came and wrapped around me like a blanket.”

Sick kids have always sold well, everywhere from novels like Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” to commercials for St. Jude’s research hospital. Wray doesn’t have to do the difficult and virtuosic work of setting up a fictional environment in which Will’s violence is forgivable. It’s the schizophrenia defense. Will’s twisted logic unspools over time, but never is there an instant’s doubt that the incident isn’t fully justified by the illness.

Wray lets Will tell his own story half the time, and gives the other half to Detective Ali Lateef, who’s leading the subway-centric manhunt. The novel is ripe with divergent identities: Will and his alter ego, “Lowboy”; his mother Yda and Lowboy’s name for her, “Violet;” Lateef and his given name, “Rufus White.” The alternating perspectives of the narrative themselves constitute a sort of double identity, mirroring the dynamic between the world of institutions above ground and the dank, chaotic world of the subway, where Will feels most at home. The universe is schizophrenic, and even the normal characters like Lateef become different people underground.

The perspective gets handed back and forth every chapter, which becomes monotonous over time and feels artificial as the story itself gets more dynamic. Still, the alternation lets Wray probe Will’s psyche from a number of different angles without having to stop and reflect, Victorian novel-style. Lateef, on the other hand, is a stock character; the spiritually exhausted public servant, who experiences a mid-career crisis of confidence and develops an inappropriate affection for Violet Heller. Somehow it seems like this is supposed to illustrate the novel’s metaphysical import. It just doesn’t really work.

Lots of things about the novel do work. Wray deposits moments of exposition at key points in his apparent madcap narrative, showing the careful planning and loving consideration of a first-rate writing talent. His prose flies along with the unstoppable force of a subway train, but he can still make me pause and wring my heart out over poor Lowboy.

We have 258 heart-wrenching pages on this kid, but none of them answers the question of why write a single one. Sure, he has schizophrenia, but that’s simply a fact of his fictional life no matter how much it tugs at my heartstrings. So—what? If I’m going to invest myself in “Lowboy”—or in John Wray, for that matter—I need to know that his story matters not just to his mother and him. I need to know that it matters to me.

Wray still has plenty of novels left in him, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that his next one will be the one. Even now I’m not complaining. Only hoping. Like I said, I like “Lowboy”—because it’s likable, though, not because it’s great.

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.