Books from the Crypt: The Ecstatic, by Victor LaValle
A couple of years ago, I became a little obsessed with finding book deals. I’d go into a few favorite bookstores, promise myself I’d just look, and rummage through the used and/or sale books until I found something amazing at a steep discount. It didn’t take long for the habit to outpace my reading, and I now have a backlog of more than 100 books sitting on my shelves.
I regret nothing. But I am determined to at least die under a pile of books I’ve actually read, and as I work through them I am sharing the best here. Many are older and/or lesser known books from some of my favorite authors; some are simply random surprises. I think they all convey something worth knowing, and I hope you agree.
First up: The Ecstatic.
“To me women were like the perfect model of government: paving the roads and protecting the weak. Omnipotent,” opines Anthony, the not so reluctant hero of Victor LaValle’s 2002 first novel. “Boys without fathers say that kind of thing a lot. About their mothers. About their wives. Comparing ladies to goddesses and gold. But still I think we hate women even more than the average guy.”
In sparse prose that breaks into moments of punishing insight when you least expect it, LaValle’s protagonist details his attempts to reintegrate into his family and community. We get started when Anthony’s family — mom, grandma, and little sister — rescue him from Ithaca after finding out that his last two years at Cornell have been a sham. In the midst of a breakdown, Anthony has dropped out of college, grown to 315 pounds, and is “living wild in his apartment.” He greets his family at the front door naked and is taken back to Queens to live in the basement of his childhood home.
In typical LaValle style, that’s the story, but not really. The Ecstatic is much more concerned with Anthony’s precarious mental state, and the question of what “crazy” really means. As we follow him through interactions at a shady weight-loss center, a new job as a house cleaner, dreams of making a horror movie, and a surreal road trip, we get the sense that Anthony may be teetering on the brink of insanity.
Maybe. He may also be reacting to being raised in a house filled with mental illness — his mother is schizophrenic — or maybe he’s just a kid trying to figure things out. You get the sense that LaValle is not really interested in the answer. And perhaps there isn’t one. Yes, Anthony often speaks his inner thoughts out loud, can be shockingly inappropriate, and appears to lose time on occasion. But he can also be strikingly coherent and seem like an island of sanity in contrast to the people surrounding him.
Though she is initially in recovery, as the novel progresses Anthony’s mother slides into yet another psychotic break. The effects on Anthony and his family — shown from the perspectives of a parent with an ill child and children with an ill parent — are realistic and heartbreaking. And in the case of his 13-year-old sister, at times disturbing.
The novel’s best sequence involves an ill-fated road trip to Virginia. There Anthony encounters a mysterious man named Uncle Arms, who runs an alternate beauty pageant where the highest honor goes to the girl with the best sob story. Exactly who Uncle Arms is and what he is up to are never quite answered, but his introduction leads to an exquisite scene in the middle of the woods and a bizarre showdown at the pageant proper.
Those expecting the delicious descent into horror that characterizes much of LaValle’s later work — The Devil in Silver (2013) and The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) are two of my favorites — may be disappointed by the restraint he shows in The Ecstatic. While there are shades of horror, LaValle keeps it real. Or at least surreal. Instead, the horror angle comes through Anthony. He is obsessed with horror movies and takes out an ill-advised loan for a horror movie project that ends up taking a strange and fitting turn.
Though Anthony is well-rounded and sympathetic, the world around him is less fully rendered. Even accounting for Anthony’s sometimes limited scope of understanding, a few characters are a bit too thinly sketched through his eyes to make a clear impression. The local loan shark Ishkabibble, for example, roams in and out of the story in a way that often distracts from the more interesting interpersonal dynamics at play. And the women in Anthony’s life sometimes struggle to be more than collections of his perceptions.
Even so, there are more than enough moments of insight and humanity to make Anthony’s strange coming of age tale worth it. LaValle has a keen eye for psychological nuance, and a commanding grasp of the subtle ways in which we deal — or fail to deal — with madness. The Ecstatic has something quietly profound to say about the nature of insanity, families, and finding your way in the world. All too often, stories about struggles for sanity follow predictable arcs that end in healing or transcendent rediscovery of self. Or else they end in high tragedy, with the world of the characters permanently stuck or broken.
LaValle resists both well-worn paths, and instead makes the point that sometimes madness just is. It is sometimes terrible, sometimes funny, sometimes confusing, and, for better or worse, often a way of life. In the end, we don’t always transcend. Most of the time we just have to keep on living.
THE ECSTATIC
By Victor LaValle
272 pp. Vintage Books. 2002.
Misti Duvall is a writer and graduate of the MFA program at City College of New York.
