Selby's Waiting Period
To be honest, I never expected Selby?now 74?to produce another novel after what he went through with that one. And when one did appear, I opened it without expecting very much?but he surprised me.
No, it doesn't have the savagery, the complexity or the deep understanding of sheer human depravity we saw in Last Exit to Brooklyn or Requiem for a Dream, but in Waiting Period (Marion Boyars, 198 pages, $23.95) Selby proves once again that few writers can get inside the head of a deranged character quite the same way he can. That is precisely where we spend most of the book. It's a very simple story: An unnamed narrator is contemplating suicide. After thinking his way through the shortcomings of a variety of methods, he decides that the one sure way to get the job done is with a gun. When he goes to the local gun shop, however, he learns that there's a required waiting period.
Back at home, as he waits for a phone call informing him that he can come and pick up his .357, he flips through the tv channels and does some more thinking. Maybe the world wouldn't be better off without him, he decides, but perhaps it would be better off without a few other people. Bad, nasty people. People who make the lives of others a living hell. Like that VA administrator who screwed him and countless others out of their benefits. (I'm not giving anything away here.) Quickly, his focus shifts away from killing himself to killing this administrator?which seems admirable. He'd be a crusader, he figures, wiping the world clean of the assholes and the monsters, making it a better place for everybody else.
But how to do it without getting caught?
After this first successful "elimination," Selby's protagonist slips into another deep depression, again contemplating suicide, until spotting another likely victim on the evening news. Then he perks up and begins plotting again.
The entire book is written in the form of an internal monologue. The only interruption to the flow comes with the narrator's occasional interactions with other people (waitresses, store clerks)?and the intrusive voice of God, acting as a sort of Greek chorus, looking down upon our narrator and blessing the purity and sanctity of his actions. The way it's handled, though, it's unclear whether Selby intends this to be the actual voice of a bloodthirsty God, or a mere symptom of a demented psyche trying to justify murder.
Two hundred pages of a crazy man's internal monologue could be unbelievably annoying and tedious before too long, Sort of like being stuck on the train next to a chatty paranoid. In less able hands, it would be very simple to turn the narrator into some sort of raving loon, thinking all sorts of incoherent nonsense. Selby resists that urge, thankfully, by giving us a protagonist who thinks rationally, but not inhumanly so. His mind still wanders at times. He forgets to eat sometimes. He gets mad. He complains about the weather. Selby keeps him human this way, not allowing him to go off about alien implants or government plots. And by doing so, he maintains our sympathy for him. Selby even makes you root for him at times, the way Hitchcock forces you to root for Norman Bates as he's trying to sink Marion Crane's car in the swamp. You want this guy to kill his targets, even if you don't always agree with or fully understand his motivations.
In that, the book is quite good?at times extraordinary, even. Selby's one of the few writers who can make stream of consciousness both believable and interesting.
Waiting Period is not without some serious shortcomings, however. When the character's mind wanders away from the task before him, you sometimes get the impression that Selby is using the digression as an opportunity to do a little soapboxing. We get to learn what the character (and possibly Selby himself) thinks about the Internet, feminism, religion, racism, corporations, modern plumbing, the nature of sanity, any number of things. It can be a little distracting, and gets awful slow sometimes.
More problematic is the distinct impression I got that after spending a good deal of time and effort on the first half of the book?the murder of the VA official?Selby whipped through the book's second half in a rush, not giving it nearly as much thought. As a result, though the killings the narrator plans and carries out become much more elaborate and difficult (and so potentially more interesting), we learn very little about how, exactly, they were accomplished. One minute he's scheming, and in the next the job's behind him.
The narrator goes to a small county fair in the South to eliminate a racist who was once acquitted of murdering two black doctors. He also plans to eliminate all 12 jurors who acquitted him. Though we learn that the narrator has downloaded hundreds of pages of background on all these people, we never learn much about what he learns about them. And though the mechanics of murdering 13 people without being detected could be quite fascinating, the scene seems to end in a flash. (Though to be fair, he doesn't get all of them.)
Even more abrupt is the final section of the book, in which the narrator decides to trigger a nationwide gang war between the Russian mob and the Italian mob (though his reasons for doing so are unclear). This time, we learn even less about how he plans to go about it. We get some rough idea of what he's up to, then it's done.
What promised at the beginning to be a philosophical addition to the Death Wish series (where our hero exterminates the powerful and the morally corrupt instead of street thugs) ends as a lesson that's so simple and obvious some readers might even find it a little banal: "Life is worth living if you give yourself some sort of purpose."
Well, yeah. I guess I would've hoped that Selby would have given his protagonist a little something more than that to say. I mean, he's a man who's both extremely moral and utterly amoral, who justifies destroying lives by using exactly the same reasoning most of his victims do.
Of course, maybe that's the big joke. And since we never really leave the inside of this man's head, maybe there's no way he could step outside of himself to recognize that. The book ends without any major resolutions or revelations (apart from the above "lesson"), with the protagonist still on the job.
Maybe Selby remains (as he was early on) one of those authors who hesitates to dole out the quick and easy answers, who still believes in letting the readers do a little work for themselves. The one thing Waiting Period proves, despite its weaknesses, is that Selby isn't nearly as washed up as a lot of people seemed to assume he was.