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The Mind of a Psychopath
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10160 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
2,149 Words |
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Darcy O'Brien
Darcy O'Brien, who won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first
novel, A Way of Life, Like Any Other (1978), is the author of
several best-selling and critically acclaimed nonfiction
crime
narratives. His most recent book, A Dark and Bloody Ground
(HarperCollins, 1993), will be an ABC television movie. He is
professor of English at the University of Tulsa. |
THE BUTCHER BOY
Patrick McCabe Fromm International, 1992
Never before have I been simultaneously so impressed and disgusted by a novel. Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy is the most brilliant piece of prose by an Irish writer since Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable (1958), another tough nut. Yet in reading McCabe's book, I rocked back and forth between the urge to shout "Hallelujah!" and to throw up. With Beckett, the impulses zigged toward euphoria and zagged toward narcolepsy.
A bit confused, anxious not to expose myself as a philistine in writing this review, I contacted an Irish friend of mine whose literary opinions I respect and asked her if she had read the thing. She had tried, she said, and she admired it. But she had given up halfway through. She simply could not stomach this tale of a damaged soul who comes to view himself as a pig and ends up committing various outrages, eventually murder. She was not planning to open the book again.
I checked out what impact Butcher Boy has had on the other side of the water, where it was published last year. It won the Aer Lingus-Irish Times Award, the most prestigious literary prize awarded annually in Ireland, and was shortlisted for the Booker. Now, I have read more than one dud awarded the Booker in recent years, but the Aer Lingus-Irish Times is usually a solid recommendation. The British and Irish reviews have been universally enthusiastic, yet in most of them one detects varying degrees of queasiness. I would go further. I would say that anyone who embraces this novel without serious misgivings is not a person with whom I would care to dine alone. And if I ever meet the author, I hope it is outside on a clear day with a fresh wind blowing.
At the same time I feel great affinity with McCabe, because I have written several disgusting books myself, which I prefer to believe are in their own ways meritorious. I ought not to continue commenting without confessing that my last five books, all of them fiction or nonfiction novels, contain no fewer than eighteen murders, two suicides, more than a dozen rapes and various kinds of sexual perversions, and other crimes, many of them described in vivid narrative detail. No less an authority than one of the Hillside Stranglers has brought suit against me on grounds of taste--specifically, invasion of privacy--and my current book was banned for a week by a federal judge, who thought the blood-spattered cover disgusting. One of my primary interests is the criminal mind, and I have defended my
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