Review: Poor Little Rich Boy (A Review Of The Stalker By Paula Bomer)

By Hugh Blanton

 

Paula Bomer said she got inspiration for writing The Stalker from reading Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf. Certainly the resemblance can be seen in The Stalker's main character, Robert Doughten "Doughty" Savile, to the protagonists of those two books, however nobody will find themselves rooting for anti-hero Doughty—he's irredeemable. Compelling, but irredeemable. Seventeen-year-old Doughty, and his two friends Stan and Lew, live in a wealthy Darien, Connecticut neighborhood and they sometimes go slumming in Doughty's parent's car to run-down Waterbury where they like to feel superior. They wonder what it would be like to seduce the Irish-American waitress that works at the diner that they frequent—and Doughty vows to to just that.

 

The Stalker takes place in the late 80s and early 90s—there are answering machines and VCRs and Bill Clinton wins the election. Doughty adores his 1974 Encyclopedia Britannica set, another tool he uses as an ego booster as he spouts facts to the plebes around him (he's deluded enough to believe they are impressed with his knowledge). Back to the Future II rules the box office and the crack epidemic is just getting underway. Handsome Doughty comes from a long line of bluebloods; his father's motto is "Every woman loves a fascist" and his mother is a meek alcoholic. His father dies unexpectedly and Doughty is the only one in the will—his mother was left out. Doughty meets with the estate lawyer ready to inherit his fortune and gets some bad news. His father's bank account has a total of $345 and the house is a half-million dollars underwater. Now he understands why his parents never did anything about the dead trees in the front yard. The bank takes the house, Doughty's mother takes a job in a flower shop and moves into the tiny apartment above it, and Doughty takes his $345 (plus a large baggie of cocaine he stole from his roommate) and sets off for the Big Apple to seek his fortune.

 

Primed with charisma, confidence, and sociopathic self-delusion, Doughty's sure he's going to "make it there," as the old song goes. He finds his first money making opportunity in the men's room in Grand Central Station at 3 AM when he discovers men will gladly pay him for sex:

 

After that was in his pocket, they all got in position again and it didn't take long. At first, the feel of the man's mouth bothered him, as did the bald head, which, because of his amazing vision, even though now he was looking straight ahead at the white bathroom door, he could see. The feel of his particularly thin saliva and his dryish, old-man lips. But he used the distraction, this irritation, as fuel. It was disgust really, and it made him angry, which made him harder. Anger was fuel to get the work done. Efficiency was one of his many skills.

 

Bomer said in an interview with Megan Nolan in The Guardian that "Originally I wanted him to be the devil. The actual devil, evil incarnate. But then I found myself humanizing him. And I kind of regret it." She didn't really humanize him very much, Doughty gets over his initial self-disgust and even learns to cruise the piers for more prostitution money. He finds himself a place to stay after he picks up a woman, Sophia, in a bar. Sophia tells him he has to leave so she can go to work the next morning, Doughty refuses and she relents. He starts referring to her place as "my Soho loft."

 

The Stalker isn't just a sociopath novel, it's a New York City novel. Like Garth Risk Hallberg's novel City on Fire, it captures both time and place. I had one minor quibble, however, with Stalker where Bomer describes Sophia's building: "Next to her building, a new hotel, the Mercer, had just opened up." The Mercer didn't open until 1997. She accurately portrays the pre-Uber/Lyft taxi cab days where Brooklyn residents had to rely on gypsy cabs because Yellow cab refused to go there. Even if outside Brooklyn and a fare gave a Brooklyn address, drivers would order the fare to get out and refuse to move until they did. Rents, too, are described accurately for the time period, $350 for a room in Brooklyn with three roommates picking up the rest. The Christopher Street piers, then run down and mostly abandoned, were popular cruising areas for gay men and even though they've been restored and renovated today, they are still popular hangouts for homeless LGBT youth. 

 

Soon after Doughty arrives in New York City he wanders into a bar and is surprised to see Beata, the waitress from Waterbury, tending it. She had moved to New York to go to nursing school. Doughty uses his charm again (they in fact did have sex back in Waterbury) to get her to let him stay in her apartment. Doughty tells her, like he told Sophia, that he is real estate and has several deals cooking. It's a little unclear as to whether or not the women believe Doughty; they wonder why they never see his clients or coworkers, but they never actually call him out on his bullshit. Doughty moves between Sophia's loft, Beata's apartment, and a storage unit he's rented (that's where he stores his beloved Encyclopedia Britannica). Doughty soon discovers crack cocaine and becomes addicted. His behavior becomes severely erratic, he rapes Beata in her apartment and doesn't notice that Sophia has died in bed until he couldn't get her up after three days. Doughty reacts to Sophia's death by getting a consultation with a squatters' rights attorney, but in his drug/alcohol addled state never gets the paperwork completed. Things go downhill pretty quick for him after that.

 

Doughty's an appallingly repellent character, but he's also grimly fascinating. His role model is George Carlin; he watches a VHS tape of a Carlin performance so often he can recite it word for word, nodding along as Carlin ridicules the stupid masses. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Doughty believes himself to be brilliant. Every bit the sociopathic narcissist that Tom Ripley was, Doughty's too egotistic (and drug addled) to keep his scams going the way the talented Mr. Ripley did. Even as his world comes crashing down all around him, he still believes himself to be the center of the universe and the captain of his destiny.

 

 

 

 

 

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw (Anxiety Press). He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5