Robert "Doughty" Savile never gets tired of winning.
When the reader of Paula Bomer's shocking new novel, The Stalker, first meets Doughty, he's a high school student sitting in a Watertown, Conn., diner with two of his friends. The three have driven to the town from their homes in wealthy Darien: "They did this to feel adventurous, to be in another world, a lowly world, a world of people with [bad] jobs and cheap clothes." Doughty resolves to have sex with a waitress named Beata before returning home to watch Wheel of Fortune with his mother.
"He liked winning," Bomer writes. "He loathed losing. It wasn't something he could accept at all, so he didn't."
Doughty is, in fact, a loser, all lies, entitlement and self-delusion. In terms of humanity, he's one of the most appalling characters in recent American fiction — and that's the point of Bomer's dizzying book, a fascinating look at an absurdly stupid young man in the early 1990s who manages to sustain himself despite having no evidence of a soul.
Doughty later returns to Watertown, and has a sexual encounter with Beata that turns nonconsensual. The encounter is the result of Doughty's misogyny, which he comes by honestly: "Beata, his bird. His father used to refer to women as 'birds.' Birds had amazing brains, even though their brains were small. And regardless of their brains, they were something to be caught. And put in a cage." Doughty admires his father, a once-rich man who has lost most of his money, and when the man dies while Doughty is in college in Boston, he is too ignorant to understand that he will inherit nothing but a few hundred dollars.
Nonetheless, he drops out of college and moves to New York with just over $300 and some cocaine he stole from his roommate. He reconnects with Beata, who is working as a bartender while going to nursing school and is initially not happy to see him. He also meets Sophia, a book editor, at a bar; he tells both women that he is working in real estate. (He is not: "Anyone working was already losing," he muses early in the book.)
Instead, he spends his days walking around the city, doing drugs and taking over Beata's and Sophia's apartments. He is a stunning failure of a person, but he's mired in self-delusion, which becomes even more pronounced when he discovers a new drug: "He had never smoked crack! It was amazing. WAY more fun than snorting cocaine. Everything great about Doughty became greater. His mind, his powers, his hair, his future, his plans. He had the best plans! Anything he planned was the best plan!"
Both Beata and Sophia know there's something wrong with Doughty — he doesn't let either of them see his home or office, neither of which exist, and he treats them beyond terribly — but they find it difficult to get him to leave, because of his occasional love-bombing and his pure insistence, and, above all, entitlement: "Here was the thing. He was owed. Everything — everything that came his way — was his. His inheritance. This was one of the moments, like all the moments in his life, one after another, of what he deserved."
The Stalker is beautifully executed. Bomer tells the story with a third-person limited point of view, which forces readers to get uncomfortably close to Doughty, a uniquely repellent character whose obliviousness makes him grimly fascinating. Her decision to set the novel in the early 1990s is a smart one: While this book can be read as a commentary on the "manosphere" — the name given to the group of misogynistic influencers who have poisoned the culture — the setting makes it clear that this particular brand of toxic masculinity is far from a new thing.
This is, in part, a darkly funny novel, and Bomer walks a fine line brilliantly — the moments of humor don't detract from the seriousness of the themes. Doughty believes himself to be an intellectual despite ample evidence to the contrary, and his constant failure to get the point is undeniably comical, as when he gushes over one of his idols, the comedian George Carlin: "The man was such a genius. He was a hero of the intelligent people, people like himself. The masses? They were to be dealt with for who they were. Stupid. He was with Carlin. He was one of the not-stupid people."
There's no doubt that this is a difficult novel to read — there are sexual assault scenes that are almost impossible to stomach — but for those interested in how we got to this particular cultural moment, it might be something approaching necessary. How can an unintelligent, cruel, misogynistic man who lies about his real estate business and is beset by delusions of grandeur manage to charm his way into the lives of people who should regard him with contempt? It sounds crazy, but it's happened once or twice before.
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