“You’ve got to read it—he captures what it’s like to be schizophrenic better than anyone I’ve ever read,” I told our managing editor.
“And how would you know?” Bry asked dryly.
He had a point. I have no idea how “true” Wray’s novel really is (although the acknowledgements at the back are respectable and fairly hefty.) But a novelist’s truth comes as insight and depth, not literal correspondence, and as I read Lowboy, I felt my brain start to open.
We toss around phrases like “paranoid schizophrenic” or “psychotic break” pretty lightly these days, as though we all know what they mean. But when your brain is wired a certain way, it’s nigh impossible to imagine what you’d think and how you’d feel if somebody undid all the bows and re-tied the neurons in a different configuration, snipping one here and there, tangling a bundle, reaching way across to make one almost transcendent. The kind of schizophrenia that affects Lowboy makes too many connections, adds too much meaning. Patterns and symbols are everywhere. So, therefore, are danger and beauty.
Accurate or not, the book let me imagine such a world in a way I’d never managed.
It also had me holding my breath to see what happened—it's got the pacing of the best thrillers. The novel alternates between rapid action and moments of stillness, fear and delight, violence and tenderness, despair and sardonic humor. Every transition’s smooth, pulling you inexorably forward. The characters of the cop, the mother, and the girlfriend are all, in that haughty academic phrase, “fully realized”—in other words, real and complete and as knowable as your best friend.
Mental illness fascinates me—partly because it teaches us so much about sanity, and partly for the raw challenge of understanding something so deeply strange. I’d read journal articles almost as willingly. But Wray’s novel had the pace of The DaVinci Code, the sensibility of Catcher in the Rye, the fun of all those great indie films about quirky strangers falling in love. It’s cinematic because it’s so visual and so compelling, but it does what film can never do as well as a novel: It comes alive inside your own mind.
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
