The teenaged boy’s quest to get laid is one of fiction’s most
inexhaustible tropes, whether it’s Nick Twisp pining after Sheeni
Saunders in C.D. Payne’s teen-angst classic Youth in Revolt, or
those dudes in that one movie about the pie.
The protagonist of John Wray’s daring third novel is on a mission
that evokes the plot of Porky’s, but it would be a mistake to
conflate Lowboy with the rest of the genre. Will, AKA
Lowboy, is a 16-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who’s become
obsessed with climate change, believing Earth to be on the brink of
overheating. He’s concluded that the only way to end global warming is
by lowering the temperature of his own body, and the only way to do
that is by having sex with his friend Emily. Problem is, last time he
saw Emily, he almost killed her in an outburst for which he was
institutionalized. (The fact that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic and off
his meds is also a problem.)
Wray handles this bizarre scenario the only way he can: By
explaining as little as possible, and allowing the details of Will’s
bizarre mission to emerge slowly over the course of the book.
As Lowboy begins, Will is riding the New York Subway, having
just been released from the hospital—but not, as planned, into
his mother’s custody. He’s set out on his own to find Emily, and it’s
clear off the bat that something’s not right: Will manages to freak out
everyone in his train car, with talk like, “The world’s going to die in
10 hours. Ten hours exactly, Grandfather. By fire.”
As Will searches for Emily, a parallel search is taking place:
Will’s mother is helping a police detective piece together the details
of Will’s life, trying to understand where he might be and where he’s
going.
By all rights, this book should read as utterly preposterous: Global
warming? Schizophrenic sex quest? What? Wray’s writing is so spare and
direct, though, that the book only seems odd when you stop to think
about it. Meanwhile, narrative tension is established immediately and
ratcheted up to a vibrating intensity by the end of the novel, making
Lowboy that rarest of books: an utterly new take on a familiar
theme.