Lowboy by John Wray

The Barnes & Noble Review

Scientists, politicians, and environmental activists may think they know how to solve global warming, but Will Heller, the protagonist of John Wray's third novel, is certain he has the answer: he needs to have sex. The self-described "Lowboy" is, he believes, a walking furnace who is personally responsible for the melting icecaps and shifts in weather. Through coitus, he will cool his body and save the world from fiery destruction.

Lowboy, a jarring odyssey through its title character's mind, takes place in the course of one day as we follow 16-year-old Will on a subway ride through New York City's dark underbelly. Overmedicated and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, Will has just escaped from a mental institution and is haunted by demons as he descends deeper and deeper into his personal hell (Wray, it seems, has chosen his characters' names with particular care). Will is convinced the doctors at the mental hospital (or "school," as he calls it) were the ones who "put degrees in my body." Since then, his core temperature has been responsible for raising the Mean Global Temperature. He must now make himself "an airconditioned body."

In the opening paragraphs, as Will boards the train, Wray unmistakably sets the stage for the phantasmagoric trip on which we're about to embark:

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.

The boy is pursued by Detective Ali Lateef and Will's mother, who may be just as mentally disturbed as her son. A doting parent, Violet Heller puts the "mother" in smother. She admits she might have aggravated Will's illness, "But I didn't cause it," she insists.

Whatever the reason -- genes, abuse in childhood, quick-to-medicate psychiatrists -- the fact remains that Will poses a threat to society…even if he himself doesn't see it that way. "The air is changing every single minute," he tells a subway vagrant. "It's thickening and flattening and building up speed. The air is getting hotter every day." It's up to him and him alone to cool the world.

He'd been given a calling: that was what it was called. It was a matter of consequence, a matter of urgency, a matter possibly of life and death. It was sharp and light and transparent as a syringe.

The comparisons with Holden Caulfield are inevitable and, to some degree, justified; but as it progresses, Lowboy bears less of a resemblance to The Catcher in the Rye than it does I am the Cheese, Robert Cormier's classic novel that bends and flips narrative preconceptions as the story of a troubled young man's bike ride unfolds. Like Cormier, Wray keeps the reader warily on edge, forcing us to question the reality of what's being filtered through Will Heller's perspective. Is a fellow passenger on the B train really a turbaned Sikh, or could he be nothing more than a discarded newspaper and plastic bag with which Will holds imaginary conversations? What are we to make of the times when Will speaks but no one else seems to hear him? Is he, in fact, actually on a subway -- or is this tour of the under-city all in his fevered head? It's just that sense of unease which Wray uses to keep the novel always slightly tipped off-balance.

Lowboy is less successful when the story shifts away from Will, especially in the chapters describing Detective Lateef's pursuit of the teenage fugitive. Though Lateef is initially portrayed as the generic brand of quirky detective (one you'd rarely find in a squad room outside of television or literature) who likes "anagrams, acrostic poems, palindromic brainteasers and any cipher that could be broken with basic algebra," he never fully comes to life, aside from the fact that he likes to sniff photocopies and bask in "the aroma of fresh toner." He functions well as a Javert to Will's Valjean, sweating and limping after the elusive, overheated boy; but beyond that, Ali Lateef lies flat on the page.

The novel's best moments are those that allow readers to descend, like spelunkers rappelling in a dark cave, into Will's frantic, frenetic mind. Here, Wray has crafted a stream-of-consciousness narrative that grows increasingly more frightening as we start to suspect the boy's intentions may not be full of goodwill and charity to his fellow man. The hissing, shrieking subway tunnels reflect the cluttered, broken synapses of Will's "cramped and claustrophobic brain." Yet, even in his madness, there is the beauty of poetry:

He pictured [the train] late at night, following its ghost through its melancholy circuit, empty as the shell of a cicada. The thought of it made him lightheaded. He imagined the world that way, carbonized and disemboweled by fire, brittle and egglike, cycling through its orbit like an automated car. No more arclights, no more sidings, no more stations. No more passengers. His eyes tipped backward in their sockets and he stared into the dead starcluttered future. He was part of the future but only as a wisp of stellar gas. No life anywhere to speak of. No tunnel any longer and no hurry, no calling, no need for any kind of sacrifice. Only space and knowledge without end.

There is a certain amount of heartbreak at work alongside Will's messianic complex. From the opening scene of a boy getting on a subway train to the novel's final, shattering sentence, Wray has crafted a story of global proportions set in the confines of one person's mind. As readers, we both fear and fear for Will as he moves "through a world transfigured and redeemed by sacrifice." --David Abrams

David Abrams's stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, The Greensboro Review, and The Missouri Review. He's currently at work on a novel based in part on his experiences while deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army.

From the Publisher

Early one morning in New York City, Will Heller, a sixteen-yearold paranoid schizophrenic, gets on an uptown B train alone. Like most people he knows, Will believes the world is being destroyed by climate change; unlike most people, he’s convinced he can do something about it. Unknown to his doctors, unknown to the police—unknown even to Violet Heller, his devoted mother—Will alone holds the key to the planet’s salvation. To cool down the world, he has to cool down his own overheating body: to cool down his body, he has to find one willing girl. And he already has someone in mind. Lowboy, John Wray’s third novel, tells the story of Will’s fantastic and terrifying odyssey through the city’s tunnels, back alleys, and streets in search of Emily Wallace, his one great hope, and of Violet Heller’s desperate attempts to locate her son before psychosis claims him completely. She is joined by Ali Lateef, a missing-persons specialist, who gradually comes to discover that more is at stake than the recovery of a runaway teen: Violet—beautiful, enigmatic, and as profoundly at odds with the world as her son—harbors a secret that Lateef will discover at his own peril. Suspenseful and comic, devastating and hopeful by turns, Lowboy is a fearless exploration of youth, sex, and violence in contemporary America, seen through one boy’s haunting and extraordinary vision.

The Washington Post - Michael Lindgren

…dizzyingly seductive …Making your central character deeply insane is, of course, a risky and ambitious trick, but Wray carries it off with a fluid, inventive style that rises at times to a frightening pitch. Lowboy is an amplified hero for our times

The New York Times - Charles Bock

This is a meticulously constructed novel, immensely satisfying in the perfect, precise beat of its plot. Wray, however, has larger goals than a thrill ride. The book's core is a nexus of tragedy—the tragedy of a 17-year-old girl who, though she knows better, might do anything for the boy she loves; the tragedy of a mother whose life has been devoted to her son, yet who is incapable of helping him and who just may have been the source of his troubles; the tragedy of a middle-aged man caught between protecting the public and helping a parent; and finally, ultimately, the tragedy of a bright and beautiful teenager who not only must deal with all the confusions and pressures of being 16, but who, through no fault of his own, is not stable enough to be able to purchase a cupcake without confrontation. I'd be proud to be seen reading this novel on the downtown 6, or anywhere else at all.

Publishers Weekly

Wray's captivating third novel drifts between psychological realities while exploring the narrative poetics of schizophrenia. The story centers on Will Heller, a 16-year-old New Yorker who has stopped taking his antipsychotic medication and wandered away from the mental hospital into the subway tunnels believing that the world will end within a few hours and that only he can save it. It's a novel that defies easy categorization, although in one sense it's a mystery, as a detective, Lateef, is on the case, assisted by Will's troubled mother, Violet. As Lateef tracks Will and gains some startling insight into Violet, Wray deploys brilliant hallucinatory visuals, including chilling descriptions of the subway system and an imaginary river flowing beneath Manhattan. In his previous works, Wray has shown that he's not a stranger to dark themes, and with this tightly wound novel, he reaches new heights. (Mar.)

Lawrence Rungren - Library Journal

Will Heller, aka Lowboy, is a brilliant but troubled 16-year-old paranoid schizophrenic in New York City. Recently escaped from a mental hospital and obsessed with the notion that the world is about to be destroyed by global warming, he boards the subway one morning seeking to save the world in the only way he believes it can be-by having sex with a woman. He attempts to locate former girlfriend Emily Wallace, whom he has not seen since he pushed her onto the subway tracks a year earlier, the act that led to his stay in a mental hospital. Throughout his daylong adventures in the tunnels and streets, he is pursued by police detective Ali Lateef and his mother, Violet, a woman with her own secrets, who seek to bring him home before he harms himself or others. Their growing relationship provides both a parallel and a counterpoint to that of Will and Emily. Wray presents a powerful and vivid portrait of Will's mental state, believably entering into his apocalyptic vision of the world. Recommended for public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

A teenaged paranoid schizophrenic risks his fragmenting grasp of reality in a quixotic attempt to save a world threatened by global warming, in Whiting Award winner Wray's deeply disturbing third novel. As in Wray's previous books (Canaan's Tongue, 2005, etc.), this one is constructed from several interconnected stories. The narrative is occupied with three searches. The primary one is that of 16-year-old Will Heller, who walks out of a mental hospital and into the New York subway system, en route to a desired reunion with the former schoolmate, Emily Wallace, who was both his prospective lover and a presumably accidental victim of Will's tendency to succumb to uncontrollable violence. The sources of such instability may lie in undisclosed experiences of sexual abuse or elsewhere in Will's troubled relationship with his Austrian-born mother Yda (he calls her "Violet"), whose search through her own past adds both explanatory exposition and subtle misdirection, as the reader struggles to comprehend Will's belief that "cooling" his own virginal body can avert a coming worldwide holocaust. The addled viewpoints of Will and Violet are challenged, and to some extent explained by the investigations of Ali Lateef, a weary SCM (Special Category Missings) police detective who senses that finding Will before he harms himself or others requires understanding the mysteries in Violet's occluded past. The novel has a thriller-like pace, and Wray keeps us riveted and guessing, finding chilling rhetorical and pictorial equivalents for Will's uniquely dysfunctional perspective (e.g., as he watches Emily approach: "A green girlshaped pillar rose through the veins of his retina like ivy twining through achain-link fence . . . Her features came apart like knitting"). The suspense is expertly maintained, straight through the novel's dreamlike climactic encounter and heart-wrenching final paragraph. The opening pages recall Salinger's Holden Caulfield, but the denouement and haunting aftertaste may make the stunned reader whisper "Dostoevsky." Yes, it really is that good.

Product Details