Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2009
John Wray's novel, Lowboy, is about a schizophrenic teenager who has stopped taking his medication and escaped the asylum into the New York subway. The novel follows William Heller, aka "Lowboy," below ground and above, as he pursues what he perceives as his quest to save the world. When we first meet Lowboy, he is on a subway train, the setting for a significant portion of the novel. Wray actually wrote much of the novel while riding on the subway, and his familiarity with and affection for the subway is evident in his poetic descriptions:
"Trains were easier to consider. There were thousands of them in the tunnel, pushing ghost trains of compressed air ahead of them, and every single one of them had a purpose. The train he was on was bound for Bedford Park Boulevard. Its coat-of-arms was a B in Helvetica type, rampant against a bright orange escutcheon. The train to his grandfather's house had the same color: the color of wax fruit, of sunsets painted on velvet, of light through half-closed eyelids at the beach."
John Wray's novel, Lowboy, is about a schizophrenic teenager who has stopped taking his medication and escaped the asylum into the New York subway. The novel follows William Heller, aka "Lowboy," below ground and above, as he pursues what he perceives as his quest to save the world. When we first meet Lowboy, he is on a subway train, the setting for a significant portion of the novel. Wray actually wrote much of the novel while riding on the subway, and his familiarity with and affection for the subway is evident in his poetic descriptions:
"Trains were easier to consider. There were thousands of them in the tunnel, pushing ghost trains of compressed air ahead of them, and every single one of them had a purpose. The train he was on was bound for Bedford Park Boulevard. Its coat-of-arms was a B in Helvetica type, rampant against a bright orange escutcheon. The train to his grandfather's house had the same color: the color of wax fruit, of sunsets painted on velvet, of light through half-closed eyelids at the beach."
Lowboy's chapters alternate with those of missing persons detective, Ali Lateef, who over the course of a single November day with the boy's mother, assembles the pieces of a puzzle that, alongside Lowboy's own narrative, gradually reveal Wray's schizophrenic narrator to be both a danger to himself and to others.
Much of the novel's narration is halting and observational, mirroring Lowboy's own skewed perception of the world and the people around him, as in this passage in which he regards a teenage girl on the subway:
Much of the novel's narration is halting and observational, mirroring Lowboy's own skewed perception of the world and the people around him, as in this passage in which he regards a teenage girl on the subway:
"The longer Lowboy looked at her the less he understood. His take on the girl, on the Sikh, on everything in the car refused to hold still any longer. His thoughts slid like mercury from one possibility to another. The spaces between events got even wider. They were empty and white. He forced himself to focus on the surface of things and on the surface only. There's more than enough there, he said to himself. He let his eyes rest flatly on the girl."
Lowboy is an intelligent and likable protagonist, but the reader is steadily filled with foreboding as the novel progresses. It is testament to John Wray's extensive research on mental illness that Lowboy is far more than the caricature of mental illness often presented in books and movies. The other characters in the novel similarly reveal complexities during the novel, keeping the reader surprised throughout.
Lowboy is an intelligent and likable protagonist, but the reader is steadily filled with foreboding as the novel progresses. It is testament to John Wray's extensive research on mental illness that Lowboy is far more than the caricature of mental illness often presented in books and movies. The other characters in the novel similarly reveal complexities during the novel, keeping the reader surprised throughout.
Occasionally comical and consistently tragic, Lowboy is an engaging novel with a difficult subject. It is John Wray's third, after The Right Hand of Sleep (2001) which won him a Whiting Award, and Canaan's Tongue (2005). In 2007, Wray was selected by Granta magazine as one of the best American novelists under the age of 35.
