What is the nature of beauty?

In many ways, extreme beauty can be terrifying, mainly because beauty is inhuman. The human race is ugly to average; obese Section 8 baby mamas, moralizing Baptists, drugged-up gays plugging each other in public bathrooms. When a man sees a beautiful woman, or a person in general sees a virtuous individual, their instinctive reaction is fear, fear of something that is rare, uncommon, and potentially dangerous. Man is not a learning animal.

Beauty and the Least, Andy Nowicki’s latest work, is something of a departure from his usual oeuvre. A brief novella with elements of philosophy, it’s about the terror and reverence that beauty inspires in men. While it’s not his best work, Beauty and the Least’s crisp prose and daring approach to its subject matter makes it worth a buy.

On the surface, Beauty begins in familiar waters for Nowicki: the tale of another creepy yet compelling loser. The unnamed protagonist in Beauty is a middle-aged teacher who becomes smitten with a teenage girl, eventually moving to outright stalk her… at which point the book becomes something stranger.

Nowicki has a remarkable gift for taking self-pitying, deluded characters and playing them in such a way that their mishaps become high comedy. Beauty’s protagonist praises his obsession in ways that would be dramatic were they not played against the pathetic reality of his life. The book is brief (only about 30 some-odd pages once you exclude publisher Ann Sterzinger’s note at the beginning), yet it hits with you with the gravitas of a longer work, as Nowicki hurls scenarios at you and avoids wasting your time.

On a technical level, Beauty and the Least is on par with Nowicki’s prior works. It’s told from a first-person perspective, hearkening back to his first novel, the epistolary Considering Suicide, though this book is considerably more focused and impactful. Beauty also lacks Nowicki’s typical penchant for disturbing (albeit meaningful) violence, making it a good introduction for those who might be turned off by the more extreme elements of his work.

While I won’t give away the ending, Beauty and the Least raises some scintillating questions about the nature of beauty. Our intrepid protagonist pursues beauty like a moth drawn to a lamp: mesmerized by it, he doesn’t realize how it can destroy him. Indeed, as his obsession with “Eve” (as he calls his beloved, casting himself into the role of the serpent) consumes every aspect of his life, the protagonist’s impotence gives way to action… of a sort. In particular, the way the story concludes surprised me, mainly because it wasn’t as… gory as I’ve come to expect from Nowicki.

The one area I’d fault Beauty and the Least in is length. While, as I said, it gets to the point and doesn’t waste your time, in many ways it feels incomplete. When I finished it, I couldn’t help but feel that it would have made a good centerpiece to a collection of thematically linked short stories. That’s just the impression I got, though.

Otherwise, Beauty and the Least is another quality release from Andy Nowicki and definitely worth your time.

I had just finished "The Columbine Pilgrim" when I started on "Beauty and the Least" so the change in tone, style and diction caught me a bit off guard. That said, the natural tendency to compare and contrast the two left my critic's mind several pages in.

This story is about desire. The unnamed main character finds himself doomed to accept his unfulfilling matrimonial life for the death trap of the soul it is. On the surface, the loyal churchgoer performs the monotonous motions of a dutiful husband and semi-responsible working class father fighting internally to retain whatever self-worth he hasn't lost. He finds some joy in observing his boys at play but the rest is banality, through and through. Fertile ground for the violator archetype to raise its rebellious head.

And so he lurches out of his walking dead state where desire is unknown to a place where its insistent existence is acknowledged and welcomed. Unfortunately, this is where a natural human impulse manifests as maladaptive. He justifies his sinful thoughts and rationalizes his lecherous actions be they based on real or imagined events - it's hard to tell which are which at times - and then brushes off stray pangs of conscience as incidental ethical hiccups.

His inward but over the top response to a teenage parishioner's flirty smile at a church service reveals how passion-starved the long-suffering family man is. It soon becomes apparent, however, that his desire is less for the girl of his dreams than it is to shirk off moral constraints that have held him in check for too long. His religion becomes useful only to the extent that it might be transgressed (the fun part about being Christian, all things considered, because you haven't really met God until you've sinned).

No sooner does his idealization of his off-limits princess blossom, and there's plenty of flowery, romanticized language to justify use of the verb, than it develops into full-blown obsession. His New Age astral projections are an obvious affront to his traditional religious beliefs, as he travels in the form of an incubus with the expanded powers to defile the object of his attention in broad daylight and while she's awake. With a little suspended disbelief on the reader's part, the character's paranormal visitations - as creepy as they are - offer a pseudo-plausible vehicle by which he realizes his desires.

The author executes with competent subtlety in the way he guides the reader to look further than his hero's outward lust to appreciate what he finds genuinely motivating. That I won't share, so as not to spoil the book for those who have yet to enjoy it.

Stylistically, "Beauty and the Least" is more ornate and verbose in its prose, in contrast to the terse, tight description found in "The Columbine Pilgrim" but its 1-hour Kindle estimated read-time means those who prefer the latter won't feel bogged down for long. It might be said a low-status protagonist who narrates in so learnedly bookish a way suggests not all members of the underclass resemble the uneducated dolt stereotype, but it might also be an attempt by the author to reveal a way his protagonist seeks to compensate for his self-perceived failures. Either way, it won't stop me from reading another Nowicki book down the road.