Word: wray
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...John Wray, author of the new and notable “Lowboy,” has not had an easy way as a novelist. He wrote his debut, 2001’s “The Right Hand of Sleep,” in a tent in the basement of a Brooklyn warehouse, where he would by-now-famously listen to rats copulate. For his second book, 2005’s “Canaan’s Tongue,” he did his publicity tour by raft down the Mississippi in a (failed) attempt to get people...
...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...
...instance, Wray flexes all of his considerable writerly muscle getting into Will’s schizoid mind and voice— obviously disturbed and yet disarmingly intelligent, with a palpable vein of 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...
Sick kids have always sold well, everywhere from novels like Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” to commercials for St. Jude’s research hospital. Wray doesn’t have to do the difficult and virtuosic work of setting up a fictional environment in which Will’s violence is forgivable. It’s the schizophrenia defense. Will’s twisted logic unspools over time, but never is there an instant’s doubt that the incident isn’t fully justified by the illness...
...Wray: If I'd have known nine years ago that we'd be 1,200 people today, I wouldn't have ever even come close to starting the business because I would have been terrified of going from 2 to 1,200, and I just wouldn't have been able to work out how to do it. But of course, at the time, we weren't planning to get to 1,200, we were planning to go from 22, to 30, to 35, or whatever...