Story of a Sociopath

As thick as the DSM, Navarro’s (The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud) latest is a loose, baggy monster about a particularly monstrous character. The titular sociopath is Thomas Spencer, born “without a conscience” to a New York family whom he terrorizes from an early age. His youthful exploits—scheming to break up his parents, flirting with murdering his brother—lay the groundwork for a lifetime of sometimes motiveless, sometimes motivated malignity. Thomas ascends in the world of advertizing, public relations, and political campaigning through a series of repetitive episodes usually involving blackmail, coercion, and various flat characters hissing, snarling, and scoffing at one another (“How dare you,” almost everyone in Thomas’s orbit eventually asks him). Too many scenes drag on, and further weighing down the novel are numerous, and pointless, sections detailing how Thomas could have acted were he not a self-avowed sociopath. Malevolent characters can of course be wickedly fun, as demonstrated by the narrators of novels such as John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, but those morally challenged gentlemen delighted readers with their fancy prose styles. Here, by contrast, is Thomas describing a sexual encounter: “It was a voyage of discovery into sensations I did not know existed.” Navarro’s is an earnest large-scale portrait, but the subject deserves better; after all, sociopaths are people too.[em] (Nov.) [/em]