Story of a Sociopath

September 5, 2016
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.

September 15, 2016
Bestselling Spanish author Navarro (Shoot, I'm Already Dead, 2013, etc.) details the life choices of an unpleasant character in this aptly titled novel.Thomas Spencer reflects on his past because he knows he's dying. "Tonight I am overwhelmed by memories of my life, and they all leave the taste of bile in my mouth." "As I look death in the face, I'll go over what I have lived through. I know what I did, and what I should have done." As a child of privilege growing up in New York City, he torments his nanny and frames his teacher. He tries to kill his little brother by pushing him out the window, then to separate his parents by convincing his father his mother is having an affair (she isn't). Later, he becomes an adman and moves on to blackmail, affairs, domestic violence, political machinations. He describes himself as "scum," "a scorpion." Other characters call him "a miserable bastard...a son of a bitch," "a man with no principles." When his mother dies of cancer: "I searched within myself for some emotion, but I couldn't feel a thing." He imagines the way each pivotal scene would have gone if he'd acted differently, but: "I wasn't struck with remorse for a single moment." This goes on for more than 800 pages, and the writing often feels banal. Of sex with a "high-end" prostitute he later drives to suicide: "It was a voyage of discovery into sensations I did not know existed." Of the differences between New York and London: "New Yorkers are more communicative and less formal than the British." There are dark plot twists, but the central question remains the same. "I can't stop asking myself if this life would have been better, the one I didn't want to live because I preferred to be a son of a bitch....But I never wanted to be anything other than what I am." Bullying narcissists make poor company, and the refusal to allow this one to learn anything is a risky authorial move.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.