Lowboy centers on New Yorker, Will Heller, a 16-year-old, paranoid schizophrenic who has stopped taking his antipsychotic medication and wandered away from the mental hospital he's been in for a year and a half. He's gone underground, literally, into the subway tunnels believing that the world will end within a few hours and that only he can save it. While Will wanders New York's underground, his mother Violet and Detective Ali Lateef search for him. As Lateef tracks Will and gains some startling insight into Violet, the reader is taken on several hallucinatory journeys, including chilling descriptions of the subway system and an imaginary river flowing beneath Manhattan.
It sounded, to say the least, interesting to me and was even dubbed by many reviewers as the "next American classic". The parallels between this book and Catcher In the Rye is obvious and I had hoped the actual story would follow in those footsteps but alas, I must have been on my own hallucinatory mind trip. I liked this book hardly at all! I pretty much skimmed or skipped through all of Will's chapters because it made me feel schizo (and maybe this is a good thing and shows the artists "abilities but to me it was annoying and contrived). There were times during Violet's chapters where I felt as though her story was going to lead me somewhere but in the end it was predictable and depressing (if I want to feel that, I'll turn on Fox News). Most of the time while reading this book I felt like I had just smoked a doob and tried to watch the Naked Lunch (not recommended!): Weird, jumbled, confusing, not enjoyable. Don't read this book and if you do, don't say I didn't warn you!
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