THE MINUS MAN, BY LEW MCCREARY, PUBLISHED IN THE YEAR 1991 B.C., archeologists believe, is the probably greatest American novel Owen Wilson and I have both read. And Owen Wilson only read it for work, if he did read it at all—he starred in the 1999 movie adaption. If you have by chance seen the movie and not read the book or, like me, did not even realize that it was adapted from a book, know that the movie is a bit weird and not too faithful to the novel. I’d seen it on cable in passing by the time my wife one day told me that the new editor at the dry business magazine in Boston she worked at was the author of the novel from which it was adapted. Neither my wife nor McCreary are at this magazine anymore. But when they were, at the company Christmas party at someone’s house somewhere in Brookline or wherever, McCreary could be seen standing in the kitchen slicing his famous apple pie in his leather-elbowed sports coat, smiling warmly from behind his scruffy beard and speaking softly, giving little hint—except for maybe an unnerving twinkle in his eye as he leaned toward you to hand you a slice of his pie—that he was a criminally, shamefully overlooked author. His obscurity is our sin.

The author bio on the jacket of The Minus Man describes McCreary as a magazine editor who lives outside Boston who is also the author of a previous novel, Mount’s Mistake. That’s it. None of the all-too-typical listing of every obscure literary magazine that’s ever published his work, no mention that he once won the, like, National Transgendered Dentists Northwestern Avant Garde Poetry Prize or that he was, say, once the recipient of a $27 grant from the International Coalition for the Advancement of Writers Who Have Seasonal Allergies. Nothing to stomp its foot and insist that we take him seriously or to convince us that he is some big deal writer, as author bios usually do. Nothing to insist that he is working as a magazine editor in Boston only to make some dough and have health insurance for his kids until he hits the big time. This is interesting to me, the apparent lack of ambition. To even write a novel you have to be driven and ambitious. The bio suggests that McCreary does not think of himself as a novelist first and a human second. But neither is fiction his hobby. He is dedicated to fiction. You have to be in order to have been at it for four decades. And he is still at it, I happen to know. Lew McCreary works very slowly and very carefully. The Minus Man came 15 years after his debut novel, which itself took him something like 47 years to write. And he is by nature unassuming. Not unassuming in an assuming way, like how writers tend to be unassuming. He is actually unassuming. The truth is this: If you want to be a famous author, you have to be an assuming, nasty bastard. But you also have to be an even luckier bastard. And you have to be tenacious to the point of obsession. And selfish as all hell. Unfortunately for McCreary’s fame and prestige level, at some point when he came to that fork in the road that all writers outside of the first percentile come to, he made the decision to be as devoted to maintaining a life void of food stamps, chronic ulcers, shoddy sublets, existential misery, and bill collectors as he is to writing fiction. Which means having some kind of career on top of writing novels. (In his case, editing and even starting business magazines.) Which I am sure has meant sometimes putting writing novels on the backburner for the sake of that career. Which creates a vicious cycle. I cannot help but wonder what that must do to the heart of a natural born writer: watching other writers ascend to fame not because they are any better writers but because they are more clever or are bigger sons of bitches.

There was also little to suggest as McCreary handed me that apple pie that here was a man so in tune with soul-starkness. Soul-starkness is what I call the thing that happens to you when you are by nature alienated, set adrift by yourself and your own unspeakable appetites, forever cursed to wander in a sort of desolation, because you not only cannot connect with your fellow Americans but also cannot escape being misunderstood by them.

The Minus Man is about a serial killer. Killing people is how the narrator achieves intimacy with others. He drifts from town to town, quietly and secretly deranged, a self-sufficient American man who knows how to take care of himself, working odd jobs, letting love-starved women come to him, getting sucked up into people’s lives and needs, sometimes killing them. He points to his glove compartment where he keeps a flask filled with poisoned Southern Comfort. “Help yourself,” he tells them.

It’s funny because he does little to avoid being caught. He expects to be. He has this whole fantasy of sitting around an interrogation table, busted, telling the detectives everything. Yet none of the seemingly normal people he lives among really sees him for what he really is. They see him for what they want him to be to them. And sometimes it is because they are just as dangerous or insane as he is. Which is one of the best things about the book—the deranged black humor of the people in this small Massachusetts town turning out to be even more fucked up than the serial killer.

The other best part of the book is the writing. It is clear and flawless and still somehow filled with heaving, aching, pulsating life.

It does not get any better than that: writing that is true and warm with blood and bleakly hilarious.

These are good examples of how good McCreary’s prose is, which we all need to start talking about in the same breath with the writers we always mention with regards to good prose. These are from scenes in which our hero is in a mental hospital:

The window by my head was uncurtained, vast, its glass old and wavy. I had my head turned watching through the window. Fog erased the world. I tried to cut through this fog. Something would come into view, but hardly long enough to be recognized as a distinct object, or a person or a car or a distant white building. Just dim motes, floating out of reach.

While trying to see through the fog, I could break out sweating from the pure exertion of it. I recall my tears rolling slowly across the bridge of my nose, mixing with sweat. Sometimes I believed the fog was not the world’s, but mine. But then I would see the dew forming on the aluminum shade of the lamp by my bed, the drops enlarging, sliding, falling in an unrhythmic way.

…

When you find yourself in restraints, you can defeat them by enacting in your body a stillness even more pronounced than the still compelled by the restraints. Gradually they loosen; your garments float away from your flesh, and you can spin rapidly inside of the clothing, becoming a gas and spreading evenly through the atmosphere of the room—an exactly measurable number of atoms per cubic centimeter, not simply an average. In restraints the body begins to mean nothing. You can go anywhere you want.

…

It wasn’t long before I figured out that Tim was dispensing medicine outside of official channels. I would sip a clear blue liquid from a tiny paper cup he held in the thumb and forefinger of his delicate hand. Minutes later, I was light and perfect, floating in the midst of wise thoughts and deep, generous feelings. Anyone could have said any terrible thing to me, and it wouldn’t have mattered.

Soon Tim stuck his head back in the door and asked me how it was. “You high yet?”

…

One night Tim came to my room and whispered that he was slowly killing Evan Tyrer, the man three rooms away who was unable to stop combing his hair. He could appear to be normal and fine until he began combing his hair, and then he would pathologically be forced to continue on with it—wetting the hair, combing it straight forward hundreds of swipes, eventually scraping raw the pale scalp underneath to the point that it bled and scabbed. He would lean in close to the mirror as if he was finished, then step back to regard himself and, finally, mess it up and begin again, splashing on the water. Thus could his time be filled.

“He’ll be gone by the end of the week,” said Tim.

It’s depressing to think of these perfect words being written and existing out there on paper available for anyone to read, available to be purchased online for a negligible sum of money and delivered to any doorstep in the country, and still not being read. Being a writer in America is a motherfucker. It really is. It’s a toss of the dice. It can feel a lot like being a serial killer, drifting around the fringes of everything, unable to connect beyond a certain very superficial level. That’s probably why McCreary knows so well what it is like to be this guy. Maybe what I mean is that publishing is a motherfucker. Yeah, duh. But the nature of publishing’s motherfuckerdom can be demonstrated best by Lew McCreary, author of a novel called The Minus Man. The Minus Man is a great novel. Very little I have read that has been published lately has grabbed me like last millennium’s The Minus Man grabbed me. Little of it has been as true and honest and so purposefully not clever or snide and so not self-satisfied and self-conscious and self-regarding. It is a book that will last forever. It is a clandestine secretly deranged American Classic, living among us. Here is why: People are bananas, and horrifying, especially Americans, even more especially the law-abiding, job-holding Americans, and what these respectable lunatics wandering amongst you and me will be drawn to and choose to connect with is so often beyond inexplicable, and The Minus Man captures that perfectly.

Tragically—considering how underappreciated it is—The Minus Man has also demonstrated it.

But I hope you will buy it and read it and help give it the second life it deserves.

The Minus Man by Lew McCreary - Amazon

May 2011

Back