Diary of a Rapist (New York Review Books Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Deeply unsettling, utterly compelling
Review: Earl Summerfield, 26, feckless junior clerk at the State Unemployment Bureau, miserably married to the loveless Bianca, 33, keeps a diary for one year. It becomes a record of marital hatred, the paranoia and pathetic rivalries of office life, and, increasingly, a record of violent crime - the rapes, robberies, senseless murders and gas chamber executions reported in the daily news. Earl's apparent disgust and dismay at the crime wave alternates with violent sexual fantasies of his own. Fleeing Bianca and his apartment some nights, he begins sneaking into other people's houses. When he becomes fixated with the local beauty queen, Mara St Johns, it's only a matter of time before Earl's fantasies become reality. Or do they?... I imagine many readers flee from this novel - even from the title - assuming it's some kind of exploitative or voyeuristic pornography. Far from it. It is relentlessly voyeuristic, but the object of that gaze is Earl's mind. This is a tremendously engaging novel of psychological realism, and what gives it that vivid quality is that Earl is as inconsistent as any real person. He loves himself, he's filled with self-loathing. He deserves to be promoted, he's an idiot for dreaming of it. One day he despises work, the next he can't wait to go in. One night he revels in personal insights and dreams of self-transformation, making life-changing decisions which are instantly reversed or forgotten by the next. He's a man unravelling; caught in a trap, the trap of middle-class existence which fuels our dreams without giving us any real hope of achieving them; caught, too, between desire and the Puritan legacy for which the circuit breaker is a violent rejection and punishment of sex. What's most compelling about Earl's diary is that the more deranged, anti-social and evangelical he becomes, the more consistent are his writing and behaviour. In the end, he lives up to his rhetoric.