Word: subway
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Subway — Let FlyBy paint this picture for you. You’re out, you’re at a party, you’re boozing it up like you just don’t care (which you don’t, because you were at Princeton earlier this week, and you liked it better anyway.) Right. And then all of a sudden you do care, because you’re going to be sick. You jettison the contents of your stomach into your host’s toilet...
...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...
...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...
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...
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...