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Lowboy

by John Wray

3.15 · rating details · 1,567 ratings · 391 reviews

Early one morning in New York City, Will Heller, a sixteen-yearold paranoid schizophrenic, gets on an uptown B train alone. Like most people he knows, Will believes the world is being destroyed by climate change; unlike most people, he’s convinced he can do something about it. Unknown to his doctors, unknown to the police—unknown even to Violet Heller, his devoted mother—W...more

Hardcover, 258 pages

Published March 3rd 2009 by Farrar Straus Giroux (first published January 1st 2009)

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Nov 17, 2009

Kim rated it

Shelves: contemporary, meh-at-you

Let me preface this review with this; I am in a rut. A literary rut, a professional rut, a metaphysical rut, a rut rut. Damn, I love the onomatopoeia that goes with that word… try it: grind your teeth together and spit the word out, let your tongue hit the back of your teeth with a little *pfft*. Yeah, you got it.

So, it was with a heavy sigh that I picked up this book. I can’t fully blame the book for this ‘meh’ of a rating. Not really. I wish I had something to blame.
...more

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Apr 27, 2009

Mike rated it

Recommended to Mike by: Jeff! -- and Tami. Their reviews made me scurry off to the libr

As so many reviewers note, this book is affecting and strange, often funny, and so smartly written.

That last bit--the disruptive lyrical energies of Wray's prose--was what most impressed and engaged me. Early on, as young Will/Lowboy has just gone underground, and we're just getting a bead on who he is, he converses with a fellow-passenger on the subway, "he glanced at the place on his wrist where his watch should have been. . . ." and seeing nothing there, "not eve...moreAs so many reviewers note, this book is affecting and strange, often funny, and so smartly written.

That last bit--the disruptive lyrical energies of Wray's prose--was what most impressed and engaged me. Early on, as young Will/Lowboy has just gone underground, and we're just getting a bead on who he is, he converses with a fellow-passenger on the subway, "he glanced at the place on his wrist where his watch should have been. . . ." and seeing nothing there, "not even a paleness[, h:]e wondered if he'd ever had a watch" (13). There is an endless surprise to the way Wray observes and describes. Our usual tacit understandings of how a certain kind of realism tells us certain kinds of things about the world are (as Violet thinks of Detective Lateef's curiosity in his office) thrown off the rails, dislocated. What we think we see, hear, feel, know is constantly dizzied, not in some scramble meant to approximate Will's own psyche (or at least not only that) but with a methodical 'madness' which asks us to ponder the deeply strange ways we all make sense. I found the book most unsettling in the best senses of that term: you didn't just engage with Will's otherness, his psychosis challenging the norm--it unfocused the false confidence of normalcy, took us down underneath the surface complacencies of social and psychological engagement to explore how we all construct mad, sad, angry, confused, scared, lustful, loving visions of our world and the people in it.

Which brings me to point two, Wray's empathetic portrayal of mental illness. Even as the novel flirts with thriller plotting, fuelling the narrative with the sense of threat so typical to stories of such illness, great pains are taken to ground us in Will's world, to see the dangers all around him as not isolated in his psychosis but more symptomatic of the world in which he is forced to travel. And Will's p.o.v. is not radically dislocated from others'; Ali Lateef, in particular, is a fascinating character, and Wray depicts him with the same kind of thoughtful attention to the idiosyncrasies which shape his worldview. In other words, without undercutting the real and serious difference of Will's mind, Wray avoids the two pat conventions of so many narratives of mental difference: he doesn't soften illness into a sweet pitiable innocence nor radically other it--instead defining how many strange differences underwrite all of our respective mental states.
I was a bit disappointed by a late-game plot twist which seemed to undercut some of that emphasis, for me. And I found the end heartbreaking but perhaps a little too determined by the thriller conventions he'd set up.

But I will read more Wray -- line by line, the book kept me on my toes, constantly surprised and delighted me. (less)

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Mar 29, 2009

Jeff rated it

I don't know what to say! This novel is truly a tour de force, a tense and suspenseful day in the life of a beautifully blonde, sixteen-year-old boy who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. I know the comparison is cliche, but imagine a Holden Caulfield-like figure off his meds having escaped the mental institution in which he's been placed while searching the streets of New York City to lose his virginity in order to save the world from global warming. John Wray burrows deep into the manically ...more

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Aug 03, 2009

Michael Shilling rated it

Emotionally devastating, structurally perfect, and full of amazing sentences. Wray creates a consistent internal logic to Lowboy's schizophrenia -- which, considering the inherent contradiction, is quite a feat -- while also painting a kaleidoscopic, warped point of view that is as mad as it is memorable. Lowboy reads like a thriller; it's a great example of how plot needn't be complex to be riveting, as the finely drawn characters drive the story completely. Will need to read again in a year to...more

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Mar 26, 2009

christa rated it

There is this moment in John Wray's "Lowboy" where a character says to the schizophrenic hero: "Listen to me, Heller. You're beautiful and you make me laugh and I want you to take me to that place that we just saw, but you need to stop saying things like that. They creep me out, okay? And you're not creepy."

And that completely sums up the experience of reading this novel, which spans roughly a day in the life of young teenager Will "Lowboy" Heller.

...moreThere is this moment in John Wray's "Lowboy" where a character says to the schizophrenic hero: "Listen to me, Heller. You're beautiful and you make me laugh and I want you to take me to that place that we just saw, but you need to stop saying things like that. They creep me out, okay? And you're not creepy."

And that completely sums up the experience of reading this novel, which spans roughly a day in the life of young teenager Will "Lowboy" Heller.

The story opens with him on the lam in the New York subway system after spending a year and a half institutionalized. He is hell-bent on saving the world from global warming, and believes he can do this by losing his virginity.

In alternating bite-sized chapters his mysterious mother, a beautiful, hard-to-read immigrant with an indiscernible accent, is paired with detective Ali Lateef and is searching for Lowboy, hoping to find him before he hurts someone or himself.

Lowboy's chapters are a collection of dizzy sentences, more paintings than linear thought. One minute he is deciding to buy cupcakes, but then the simple acts of ordering what he wants and exchanging money become too complicated. It's like the wheel in his brain gets caught up on a cog and suddenly everything becomes distorted and chaotic until he can slow down and start again.

His mother, whom he calls Violet, provides Lowboy's backstory via Lateef's interrogation. Most chapters include some new piece of information that explains who Lowboy is, how he got there, and what he wants. But also leaves questions and a growing suspicion that there is more to the story.

This book is technically sound: Lowboy is likable and unpredictable and interesting. And like that character, I did want to beg him to stop talking like that. Meanwhile, Violet's day-long relationship with Lateef is tricky to define: antagonistic? flirtatious? I'm not sure how Wray invented this or juggled it, but there are no seams showing.

My only complaint is that my own lack of familiarity with the subway system made it hard to envision exactly where the characters were, or where they were headed. Especially when the descriptions are coming from Lowboy. So I got a little confused.

Also, I have a question about the ending, so someone needs to read this ASAP so we can talk about it. (less)

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Mar 07, 2009

Don rated it

(FROM MY BLOG): Walk along a street in downtown Seattle. You see them everywhere. Wild-eyed men and women. Dirty, dishevelled, mumbling to themselves or yelling at the universe. Crazy people, more like scary forces of nature than human beings. Beings we nervously evade as we see them approach.

Except, of course, they aren't non-human. John Wray's novel Lowboy shows us how much humanity schizophrenics do share with the rest of us --a story being perhaps the only way we are ever apt to...more(FROM MY BLOG): Walk along a street in downtown Seattle. You see them everywhere. Wild-eyed men and women. Dirty, dishevelled, mumbling to themselves or yelling at the universe. Crazy people, more like scary forces of nature than human beings. Beings we nervously evade as we see them approach.

Except, of course, they aren't non-human. John Wray's novel Lowboy shows us how much humanity schizophrenics do share with the rest of us --a story being perhaps the only way we are ever apt to experience that commonality, unless we actually have the nerve to sit down and talk to one.

Will Heller, who calls himself "Lowboy," is a highly intelligent, unusually attractive 16-year-old who possesses a detailed knowledge of the New York subway system. He's a man on a mission, a mission to save the planet from global warming, and he has less than 24 hours to do it. To accomplish his mission, it is essential -- for reasons that make a vague sort of sense, given his assumptions -- that he lose his virginity. He is a paranoid schizophrenic, and he is on the loose from his psychiatric facility. He has stopped taking his medications.

It takes us some time to understand even this much about Lowboy, because the story is told primarily from Lowboy's own, confused point of view. Later chapters offer us other aspects of the story from the points of view of his immigrant mother "Violet," who has her own problems, and of police detective Ali Lateef who is working with her to locate the boy.

Lowboy is acutely observant of everything about him. (After finishing the book, I'll never forget that the dual-tone chime you hear on the subway, warning that the doors are about to close, is C-sharp to A.) His illness causes him to find significance in insignificant occurrences, much as Greeks and Romans did in the flights of birds or the appearance of animal entrails. He knows that he is ill. He understands that the voices he hears -- sometimes loud, sometimes as a murmur, sometimes sensed only as the indistinct roaring of a dynamo -- are part of his illness. He realizes that his symptoms increase and decrease over time. In fact, at the age of 12, when his symptoms first began but were still controllable, he read everything he could find in the library on the subject of schizophrenia. But he doesn't -- he can't -- understand enough.

The story reads partly as an adventure. We don't quite understand Lowboy's quest, but we want him to succeed. His quest takes place largely within the dark, subterranean realm of the subway system, itself a metaphor for a certain twisted, noisy, and confusing set of limitations on reality. The book also reads as a detective novel, as Lateef attempts to untangle confusing clues he obtains from Lowboy's mother, psychiatrist, and one-time girlfriend, and to locate and apprehend the boy before he injures either himself or another person. Again the story reads at times as a peculiar story of romance, the same detective finding himself falling in love with the boy's mother, for reasons he doesn't understand.

But mostly, the novel is an immersion in the mind of a young man who is precociously bright and likeable and in a sense idealistic, but whose perspective on the world is far different from our own -- a kid who thinks deeply and observes much that we would miss, but who overlooks simple meanings and conclusions that we would find obvious.

The ending is exciting and unexpected. This book is unquestionably one where you want to learn how it ends yourself -- not hear it from a friend or read it in a review.

Schizophrenia, some say, should be considered not a disease but simply an alternative way of viewing reality. After reading Lowboy, none of us would voluntarily subject ourselves to that experience. But we understand better the peculiar logic -- and even, possibly, strange beauty -- of the thoughts circling within the confused minds of those crazy guys we see on the street.
(less)

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Dec 13, 2011

Alan rated it

Recommended to Alan by: Mike Reynolds

Shelves: novels, read-in-2011

ordered this from the library, when I got there it was a large print edition. Are they trying to tell me something? Mind you it is so easy to read..

..review will follow. Trying to catch up, been busy...
just a few notes I made at the time: I was sucked up into the boy’s ‘crazy’ but ‘logical’ schizophrenic world (eg. a TV is a microscope with a big blue eye behind it) where buying a cupcake is a tantamount to destroying the world, and where his old girlfriend has to guide him an...more

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Jan 07, 2012

Holly rated it

Shelves: 2012

4 Stars.

At once beautifully written, and truly disturbing, Lowboy was a reading experience I won't soon forget. The main character of Will Hellar has made a huge impression on me. And it is that fact that makes the ultimate resolution to this dark, dark story so heartbreaking.

Read the full review on my blog:
http://ravingbookaddict.blogspot.com

More book reviews on my YT channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Bookgasmic

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Jun 14, 2009

Jenn rated it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 27, 2010

Odd_bloke rated it

Lowboy, by John Wray is a novel about a schizophrenic teenager who calls himself Lowboy. There are two main threads to the story, that of Lowboy who escapes his handlers in a subway station into the tunnels themselves, and that of his mother and the police officer assigned to find him.[return][return]I enjoyed the novel a great deal. The Lowboy thread helped me to understand what having Lowboy's condition might feel like, the constant shifting of attentions and the extrasensory feelings he was...more

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Mar 31, 2009

Jason rated it

Shelves: read-2009

Lowboy spends its time divided between two sets of people. First there is the protagonist, who picked up the name Lowboy at a mental institution in a conversation that makes absolutely no sense and is perfectly suited to the types of conversation had in this novel. The other person is Ali Lateef, originally Rufus White until his father's unfortunate conversion, a missing persons detective tasked with finding the boy and accompanied by the beautiful and strange mother.

What is difficu...more

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Dec 19, 2011

Michael rated it

Shelves: contemporary_fiction

Underwhelming.

I expected more from this novel, though it is hard to say precisely what I had hoped for. Early reviews were near raves, and I can objectively see why: There is much to admire in the prose. It is controlled and appropriately claustrophobic and smart. Wray is intent on getting us inside the head of a paranoid schizophrenic, and I suppose he succeeds, as far as that goes.

But I found myself thinking "So what?" throughout much of this. I suppose I wanted s...more

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Nov 14, 2011

Kata S. rated it

I had darker more violent hopes for the plot of Lowboy and more specifically the character, William Heller. Perhaps a majority of readers do not like such darkness, but my personal taste for it was not quenched with this book. I tasted a bad Hollywood movie staring Macaulay Culkin. It was an decent quick read (beats most trash thrillers) but I wonder whether Wray has the ability to really dip his fingers into something more psychologically disturbing and violent. The talent is there. He just n...more

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Aug 11, 2011

Jenny rated it

Shelves: read-in-2011

I so wanted to love this book. The premise sounded so intriguing. A 16-year-old teenager with Schizophrenia, Will Heller, rides the NYC subway all day long in an effort to save the world. By having sex. Which will cool off his body. So, yeah, that last part is strange, but the mental health aspect combined with the NYC aspect piqued my interests.

First, the goods. No one can accuse the author of not being a good writer. Because the writing was engaging and otherwise well done. I also ...more

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Apr 25, 2011

Abeer Hoque rated it

"LowBoy" by John Wray is about William Heller, a schizophrenic teenage boy who flees a mental hospital into the New York City subway system. It's also about the detective who pursues Will, his elegant European mother, and his tragic girl love. But it's the NYC subway which emerges as the most captivating character of all, complete with mythical river, underground palace and hell, rat infested water logged tunnels, and thundering trains.

Mr. Wray does an admirable job of recre...more

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Feb 17, 2011

Willem van den Oever rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: in-english

Author John Wray tells his story of ‘Lowboy’ - a teenager suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, who escapes from his mental institution and hides away in the New York underground - with a sharp eye for detail that helps give the tale punch without slowing down its breakneck pace. Most impressive though, are his descriptions of Lowboy’s thoughts as the boy suffers more and more from the lack of his medications. The line between reality and fantasy starts fading away and the unpredictability of...more

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Feb 06, 2011

Paul rated it

Shelves: fiction

I've discovered that, for me at least, there's disturbing between novels about mental disease written by mentally-diseased authors, and novels about mental disease written by sane authors. For example: I couldn't finish David Foster Wallace's semi-autobiographical novel Infinite Jest because the author's own mental illness intruded so deeply into the story. I was constantly aware of the fact that Wallace's depression finally got the better of him and led him to commit suicide. It freaked me o...more

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Oct 01, 2010

Kevin Nielsen rated it

I am not a good critic if one is looking for criticism here. I like to mention what I like and not break another writer's story down as far as plot and characters go...at least thats how I feel today.

Ok, Lowboy....thought it was a good read, not in my tour-de-force category, though. What I liked about it were the passages concerning the underground. Wray deconstructs and illuminates the tedium and magnifies the minutia with much skill.

Lowboy lost in the crowd - "Who...more

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Sep 26, 2010

Gerald rated it

· review of another edition

I got this in a Goodreads giveaway... thanks publishers... so here's the promised review.

There is lots of good stuff in this novel.... the setting of largely subterranean Manhattan (although the beauty of it - whilst mentioned by one of the characters once, is never fully utilised); the depictions of Schizophrenia; the ruminations on love and affection and the central relationships forming the structure of the narrative.

The biggest problem for me, was that the eponymous L...more

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Dec 14, 2009

Courtney rated it

Will Heller has stopped taking his meds, and when the moment is right, he runs. "Lowboy" - the novel's name is Will's nickname for himself - follows our schizophrenic protagonist on a thrilling, scary and smartly conceived ride through New York's subway system, and a few other places.

Will, 16 years old, believes that global warming is escalating along a parabolic curve. Only he can stop the world's temperature games, the impending apocalypse, but to succeed he has to have s...more

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Oct 13, 2009

Mike rated it

Recommends it for: drug and former drug users

Young paranoid schizophrenic goes off his meds and onto a quest. Unlike other fictional characters who could easily find a magical forest in which to quest, our hero is forced instead to travel the NYC subway system, and suffers from a diseased mind place of magical powers. Like many young people at that age he has more hormones than blood running through his veins; his quest is to save the world by means of fuck.

I've heard it said that the previous books by this author were more exp...more

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Sep 04, 2009

Vegantrav rated it

John Wray provides us with a dual-perspective story: (1) a day in the life of a schizophrenic, William Heller, whose nickname is Lowboy. Will has just been released from a mental hospital and has been off his medications for some time, so he is his normal, paranoid self rather than his medicated, "flat" self. He is convinced that he must save the world from overheating. He will do this by having sex with Emily, a girl who, some years before, he had pushed onto the subway tracks, th...more

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Jul 23, 2009

Kasandra rated it

I gave this 4 stars because of the quality of the writing, particularly that from the protagonist's perspective. It sucked me right in. But once the perspective shifted, and as the story progressed, I felt disappointed. The story is good -- I read the book in only 3 sittings --but oddly flat emotionally. I enjoyed it primarily for Wray's writing in the voice of a paranoid schizophrenic.

Have to say, he could have used a better editor, OR (in my first example, coming up) he was trying...more

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Jul 17, 2009

Jim rated it

· review of another edition

William Heller (a.k.a. Lowboy) is a paranoid schizophrenic who believes that the world will end in ten hours due to a sudden, apocalyptic episode of global warming. Unless he loses his virginity. He thinks of this as releasing "the world inside" him, an idea he's picked up from a National Geographic article on Buddhism. He has mixed up global warming rhetoric with the pharmaceutically induced shifts in his body's temperature.

The book's marketers have opted to market this b...more

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May 02, 2009

Pankhuree rated it

Shelves: genre-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 26, 2009

Jafar rated it

I read a review of this book in The New Yorker and was intrigued by a story told through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic teenage boy. The review had a few good things to say about the book, and I’m generally very fascinated by schizophrenia. But if you want to get a feeling for what goes on in the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic, I’m not sure this book does it – maybe because schizophrenia is such a complicated “disease.” (I remember reading an article by some fringe psychoanalyst who was ...more

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May 17, 2009

Jennifer rated it

A technically impressive piece of writing...the story is told from dual points of view, one a 16-year-old schizophrenic on the run from the hospital and off his meds, the other a NYC policeman, who with the boys mother, is responsible for finding him. The hard part, naturally, is writing from the boy's perspective, capturing enough of the real world around him to make sense, while also giving some idea of the convoluted things that are happening in his head. Wray is quite adept at this, even r...more

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Jun 01, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine rated it

Shelves: july-aug-2009

Like Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude), John Wray has a keen eye for the myriad, and often insidious, ways that our quick-cut culture negates the individual. In Lowboy, a narrative spanning less than a day, the author unblinkingly portrays the devastating effect of mental illness on one young man's life; in the process, Wray offers an astute critique of a world where social networking implies, more often than not, anything but. As the New York Times points out, "

...more

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Mar 16, 2009

Joshua rated it

Check out my review of Lowboy for the folks over at The Rumpus.

http://therumpus.net/2009/03/notes-from-...

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May 23, 2010

Anne rated it

Lowboy takes place in the subways of Manhattan, and tells the story of Will Heller, a 16-year old paranoid schizophrenic who has disappeared from a mental health institution intent on solving the problem of global warming by reuniting with the girl who got him into all this trouble in the first place. The narrative alternates between Will's own jumbled first-person account, and the story of his worried mother attempting to help the police find her child. I'm interested in learning more about the...more

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About John Wray

John Wray is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, Lowboy, The Right Hand of Sleep and Canaan's Tongue. He was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2007. The recipient of a Whiting Award, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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