Lowboy
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Review
A twenty-first century Holden Caulfield. --Observer
America's most original young writer has given us a book for the ages...Compelling, compassionate, and deeply unsettling. --GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Absurdistan
A smart, moving thriller, and a deeply imaginative one, too. --Time Out
A psychotic, subterranean, environmentally conscious coming-of-age novel. It is also an affecting and affectionate love letter to New York. --NATHAN ENGLANDER, author of The Ministry of Special Cases
Sucks you into the tunnels under New York and doesn't let you go until its perfect ending.
--TIM PEARS, author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves
America's most original young writer has given us a book for the ages...Compelling, compassionate, and deeply unsettling. --GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Absurdistan
A smart, moving thriller, and a deeply imaginative one, too. --Time Out
A psychotic, subterranean, environmentally conscious coming-of-age novel. It is also an affecting and affectionate love letter to New York. --NATHAN ENGLANDER, author of The Ministry of Special Cases
Sucks you into the tunnels under New York and doesn't let you go until its perfect ending.
--TIM PEARS, author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves
Review
Sucks you into the tunnels under New York and doesn't let you go until its perfect ending. Wray effortlessly portrays the cracked and distorted mind of his teenage hero. What a beguiling novel.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
To begin with I wasn't sure if I was enjoying this book, and enjoyment is probably not the word for a book like this anyway. It makes uncomfortable and yet fascinating reading. It draws you in and so before you know it you are compelled to carry on. John Wray has obviously researched his subject well, and he effectively puts you in the mind of Will Heller who suffers from schizophrenia. To do this cannot be an easy task, and it is exhausting to find yourself in such a disturbed frame of mind, unpeaceful and threatening. The mood of the book is menacing and somewhat horrifying and yet so sad too. The contrast of such a physically beautiful boy but with so much suffering and torment going on in his mind is well portrayed. You can understand Emily feeling she can help him because his beauty is so deceptive. Human nature is such that it always responds positively to beauty. You can comprehend her initial sympathetic collusion. Is everything as it seems, how much does his mother have to answer for? Where does illusion end and truth begin? Quite a powerful read.
Format:Paperback
William Heller, aka Lowboy, is on the run after breaking his conditions of release from Bellevue psychiatric hospital. He travels the subways and subterranean tunnels, off his medication and becoming increasingly psychotic as his paranoid schizophrenia takes over tipping the human need to find patterns in the chaotic into madness. Wray writes the novel from two points of view, Lowboy's increasingly disturbed perspective and that of Detective Ali Lateef, searching for Lowboy with his mother Yda, aka Violet, their tale too becoming unspooled as Lateef reflects on his altered identity, name changed when his father converted to Islam, and that of Yda. Very good, but I prefer Tabitha Suzuma's trilogy about a teenage boy with manic depression.
Format:Paperback
Will Heller, a paranoid schizophrenic known as Lowboy, reveals in the opening sentences of Wray's latest novel that he is overly sensitive to sense impressions, hearing the closing of the door of a subway car as "C# first, then A. Sharp against both ears, like the tip of a pencil." He has escaped from the "school" he has been attending for two years, believing that "the world's going to die in ten hours, by fire," and he is determined to do whatever he can to prevent this--and to lose his virginity as a way to stop global warming. He seems almost logical, though odd, as he first begins to move through the subway system, gradually yielding to more and more bizarre behavior as time passes and his medications wear off.
Ali Lateef, a New York City detective whose area of expertise is "Special Category Missing," is hoping that Will's mother, "Miss Heller," sometimes known as Violet, can provide enough information to allow him to find Will in the seven or eight hours before his lack of medication pushes him into violence, but she, too, has her problems. As Will travels the subways, he recalls stories his grandfather told him about an underground city beside the Musaquantas River, and, in fact, he finds a whole "city" beneath the streets, when he follows a homeless woman named "Heather Covington," through the tunnels and into a "room" beneath a grate on the street. He then tries to find "Emily," outside the subway, the only young woman he has ever been close to, and who seemed fond of him two years ago. The seriousness of Will's psychosis is obvious, however, from the fact that he has been committed to his special "school" because he pushed Emily onto the tracks of the subway just two years past, narrowly missing the third rail.
Will's complete inability to relate to the real world soon becomes even more obvious in a sad and moving scene in which he goes into a bakery to buy some cupcakes, completely unable to decide exactly what he wants, unable to communicate in any way with the salesperson, and unable to understand how much to pay, even volunteering that he has $640. When he finally gets his cupcakes, he puts down the bag and inspects it, determined to "take out the machinery" which he believes is inside.
Wray writes an intense and moving novel which moves inexorably to its conclusion, one which even the most hopeful reader knows is inevitable. Will's eight-hour decline into obvious psychosis is reflected gradually through Wray's prose style, becoming more and more fragmented, lacking in punctuation and transitions, and less and less predictable. He is completely unable to deal with the real world, yet the reader cares for him, and hopes for him, despite his increasingly distorted "logic" and the reader's own inability to know how much to believe and how much to attribute to his visions and voices. The power of the novel increases exponentially as Will comes closer and closer to violence. Carefully researched (and actually written while the author rode the subway every day), John Wray's Lowboy is another milestone for Wray, a finely structured, beautifully composed novel of extreme psychological illness presented in a way which touches the heart. Mary Whipple
The Right Hand of Sleep
Canaan's Tongue
Ali Lateef, a New York City detective whose area of expertise is "Special Category Missing," is hoping that Will's mother, "Miss Heller," sometimes known as Violet, can provide enough information to allow him to find Will in the seven or eight hours before his lack of medication pushes him into violence, but she, too, has her problems. As Will travels the subways, he recalls stories his grandfather told him about an underground city beside the Musaquantas River, and, in fact, he finds a whole "city" beneath the streets, when he follows a homeless woman named "Heather Covington," through the tunnels and into a "room" beneath a grate on the street. He then tries to find "Emily," outside the subway, the only young woman he has ever been close to, and who seemed fond of him two years ago. The seriousness of Will's psychosis is obvious, however, from the fact that he has been committed to his special "school" because he pushed Emily onto the tracks of the subway just two years past, narrowly missing the third rail.
Will's complete inability to relate to the real world soon becomes even more obvious in a sad and moving scene in which he goes into a bakery to buy some cupcakes, completely unable to decide exactly what he wants, unable to communicate in any way with the salesperson, and unable to understand how much to pay, even volunteering that he has $640. When he finally gets his cupcakes, he puts down the bag and inspects it, determined to "take out the machinery" which he believes is inside.
Wray writes an intense and moving novel which moves inexorably to its conclusion, one which even the most hopeful reader knows is inevitable. Will's eight-hour decline into obvious psychosis is reflected gradually through Wray's prose style, becoming more and more fragmented, lacking in punctuation and transitions, and less and less predictable. He is completely unable to deal with the real world, yet the reader cares for him, and hopes for him, despite his increasingly distorted "logic" and the reader's own inability to know how much to believe and how much to attribute to his visions and voices. The power of the novel increases exponentially as Will comes closer and closer to violence. Carefully researched (and actually written while the author rode the subway every day), John Wray's Lowboy is another milestone for Wray, a finely structured, beautifully composed novel of extreme psychological illness presented in a way which touches the heart. Mary Whipple
The Right Hand of Sleep
Canaan's Tongue
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
clever but disappointing
A young boy is schizophrenic and sees things and hides out in the New York subway.It holds your interest at first as it's very portentous,you wait for something exciting to happen... Read more
Published on 16 Nov 2009 by tubby barton
A thrilling, exhausting ride
The critical praise for Lowboy was so exalted I almost hesitated to buy the book; nothing could live up to that hype. But Lowboy just about does. Read more
Published on 6 Aug 2009 by S. Chiger
the review above is excellent....
and gives most of the storyline without spoilers so I will not expand on it. A beautifully, cleverly written book which appears to be the result of extensive research. Read more
Published on 4 May 2009 by karen bennett
Beware you are entering the Subway of the mind!.
I can see the story behind all the babblings of Will and his Mother, but it didn't become evident for me untill the closing stages. Read more
Published on 10 April 2009 by Sterile
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