Longtime readers of this ancient hoary thing of a blog (five weeks and counting, baby!) may remember my bitter remonstrances over how boring I think most literary fiction is these days. Well, I’m pleased to report that at least one literary novel is not boring at all; it is, in fact, gripping, moving, and excitingly well written.
The book in question is Lowboy by John Wray. It was published about a year ago, to very good reviews, so I’d been meaning to read it; but I didn’t get around to it until recently. And I’m so glad I did, especially because it was the next book I read after the meticulous, honest, uninspiring The Glass Castle.
The book opens with a character called Lowboy running to catch a subway train:
He got on board the train and laughed. Signs and tells were all around him. The floor was shivering and ticking beneath his feet and the bricktiled arches above the train beat the murmurings of the crowd into copper and aluminum foil. Every seat in the car had a person in it. Notes of music rang out as the doors closed behind him: C# first, then A. Sharp against both ears, like the tip of a pencil.
This paragraph is a good example of what’s so great about this book. We are presented with a character who lives in an enchanted, panpsychically alive world: “Signs and tells were all around him.” Already an aura of mystery envelops the narrative. Inanimate objects tremble with life: “The floor was shivering.” And the echoing of voices is synesthetically transmuted into “copper and aluminum foil.”
But then, just as the prose has veered into the frankly magical, or frankly psychotic, we are presented with the stark, clear, mundane statement that “Every seat in the car had a person in it.” The prose constantly swings back and forth this way, from the surreal, hyperreal experience of a most unreliable narrator to flashes of quotidian reality that anchor the story in a recognizable world. And then the mundane itself is reimbued with a hint of magic: the artificial, recorded tones that tell subway riders the doors are about to close, those tones that any longtime subway rider either hates or ignores, become “notes of music” that “r[i]ng out.” An accurate description, nothing bizarre about it, yet it reveals a certain attitude toward the world—a freshness of perception and description that pervade the entire book.
Soon we learn that Lowboy is a sixteen-year-old who has escaped from some kind of institution, the kind of place where they make sure you take your meds, but he is off his meds and on the run in Manhattan, on a mission to save the world from dying by fire within the next ten hours. To do this he must find a girl who used to be his girlfriend, while evading the police who are hunting him down. The reader becomes totally absorbed in Lowboy’s mission, even though at first we don’t understand what it’s all about. It’s not that we necessarily want him to succeed, or to fail; but we are so taken with Lowboy himself that we can’t get enough of his experience.
I don’t want to reveal more about the plot, because so much of the pleasure of reading this book comes from the obscure, almost oracular pronouncements that Lowboy makes—to other subway passengers, to a homeless woman that he meets, or in the form of a secret message that he leaves for his mother—and the subsequent decoding of those pronouncements. Through this process we gradually learn more about Lowboy and the true nature of his mission, and we find ourselves torn between rooting for him and rooting for his mother and a police detective who are working together to find him. Lowboy and the others become characters we care about, engaged in deeply human pursuits that reveal their frailty, strength, and strangeness—even the sane people.
I think my favorite thing about this book is its resolute insistence on seeing the world as a magical place. Here is a sequence showing Lowboy, whose last name is Heller, with a friend on a subway train. They have just broken the rules by staying on the train beyond the end of the line. As the train makes a slow, wide turn to head in the opposite direction, they approach a place they have never been before:
The lefthand windows were dark and unassuming but the windows on his right side gave out onto a glittering skylit tomb. Vaults of red and green and coppercolored tile arched gravely over desolated stair-wells. Vents rose toward a city no one knew. The lights of the train did nothing to dim that prehistoric vision. Its walls shed water like the belly of a ship.
“What is it, Heller?”
“The old City Hall Station,” he heard himself answer. “The place that I wanted to take you. They shut it down in 1945.”
“Yes,” she said hoarsely. “Yes. Take me there.” Her hands left dappled palmprints on the glass.
It’s not a perfect book; the sections narrated from the points of view of Lowboy’s mother and the detective, although well written and interesting in their own right, cannot live up to Lowboy’s sections. He’s just too damn interesting. Yet Wray keeps a sure hand on the tiller as the book progresses; the story accumulates power and momentum as it continues, ultimately building to a satisfying conclusion—something that far too few literary novels provide.
Finishing this book gave me a simultaneous feeling of happiness and regret, familiar to me from my teen years but rare in my adult life. Books like Lowboy rejuvenate my faith in literature and spur me on to make my own contributions.
