On November 11 Lowboy ran to catch a train. People were in his way but he was careful not to touch them. He ran up the platform’s corrugated yellow lip and kept his eyes on the train’s cab, commanding it to wait. The doors had closed already but they opened when he kicked them. He couldn’t help but take that as a sign.—from Lowboy by John Wray, available in paperback
Booksellers like to be able to suggest a book to a customer, based on another book they have loved. One of the books that has always stuck in my mind as one-of-kind both in quality and in originality (thus hard to find anything like) is Mark Haddam’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, a magical novel seen through the eyes of an autistic boy. Everybody loved it and everybody wanted something like it.
John Wray’s newest book Lowboy should appeal to all those readers who enjoyed that wonderfully different narrative voice Mark Haddam was able to manage in Curious Incident. Lowboy is Lowboy to himself, Heller to his strange charismatic girlfriend, and Will to his mother. One day he decides that Global Warming will destroy the earth that day if he and his girlfriend Emily Wallace (quite sane) don’t do something about it, although he’s not quite sure what. Emily goes with him despite the fact that he was once put in the hospital for tossing her off a subway platform.
Meanwhile, his mother, Violet, troubled if not crazy and sick with guilt that she might have caused Will’s troubles, has enlisted a very interesting missing persons cop, who accompanies her on a desperate search for the kid. It reads like a thriller, but the character-based poignant story will disappoint those who crave Ludlum. The sensitive characters are exposed to all the grit and dirt New York can provide, which they meet with an outsider’s courage that will stick in your memory.
PAUL
