The Stalker
Paula Bomer's novel about a cool dude who anyone would love to have in their life!
It’s unfortunate that today, as an aspiring member of the literary elite, you have to be careful what you read. Because if you enjoy a book, it literally means that you endorse the actions of the protagonist and that you want to kiss them and marry them.
Those. Are. Facts.
And it’s why I found myself conflicted about joyfully ripping through Paula Bomer’s The Stalker, a novel about a cokehead with a perpetual boner.
Robert “Doughty” Savile takes us on a ride from his sociopathic beginnings as a teenager to his cathartic downfall as a fake real estate mogul but full-time leech, drug addict, and abuser in New York City. Literally, the story, its tone and tenor, can be summed up with this quote:
He was amazing. Everything was his. He loved crack. He loved his dick. He loved New York City.
I loved this book. It made me uncomfortable and pretty sad but its unabashed narration was also downright hilarious. I didn’t feel at any point Bomer had to check in to ensure we knew Doughty sucked. A lot.
He’s kind of a cross between Tom Ripley and Patrick Bateman. It’s sort of trite to draw comparisons from two of literature’s preeminent psychos but it’s also hard not to do so1. But while Ripley can play act as a real human and Bateman is so insane it becomes a mockery, there was also something so creepily grounded about Doughty.
In fact, I can draw two lesser known comparisons. In Six Feet Under (just finished a rewatch, still slaps) there’s an episode (That’s My Dog, season 4) where David SPOILER FUCKING ALERT picks up a young hitchhiker while he’s driving a body from the morgue. At first, the man appears normal, well-adjusted, perhaps even, in David’s wildest fantasy, a gay man with whom he can have a casual fling.
Instead, he beats David, robs him, throws the corpse out on the highway, douses David in gasoline, and makes him suck a gun muzzle before driving away. David survives but he’s never the same. For the final season and a half, it’s essentially the turning point that defines David’s character. The episode is shocking, even by Six Feet Under standards2. And like Doughty, there’s an extended obsession with procuring and freebasing crack!
That’s the guy I most thought of when reading The Stalker. Completely self-assured that he’s right and whenever anyone tells him he’s wrong…well, that’s not possible. Doughty is so sure that he’s the best thing that ever happened to everyone he’s met, especially the women.
The second person I thought of was Alex from Emma Cline’s excellent novel The Guest. Alex is a con woman, there’s no doubt. But when it comes to quality, she’s certainly a better person than Doughty. It’s a little more vague, we’re never really in Alex’s head.
On the other hand, Alex will do seemingly anything to merely spend her summer on Long Island, sure that the rich dude who dumped her is just playing around.
There’s a lot in The Stalker that made me uncomfortable. But a lot of it is the stuff of stories, the assaults, the crack smoking (have I mentioned yet how much he loves crack?3), all of that is expected in stories about awful pieces of shit.
Maybe it’s my inherent Canadian guilelessness but the parts I found so poignant were the ways Doughty would step so carefully over the line of social order. It’s one thing to order a drink at a bar, drink it, and then duck out on the bill. Something Alex of The Guest might do. Or she might talk her way out of paying.
When Doughty goes to the bar to meet Beata (a high school classmate he already abused once) he’s downright offended when she asks him to pay. What does one do in that situation, really? You can’t exactly get in a physical altercation to solve every problem (although someone definitely does physically altercate Doughty at one point, satisfyingly so) especially if you’re a beleaguered young woman just trying to pay your way through nursing school.
I hate comparisons like this because they’re hack and overdone and I should be ejected into the sun for even writing about it but it’s sort of how the Trump presidency operates (or should I say operated because currently they’re doing Gestapo stuff in Minnesota) by crossing over established norms and taunting everyone else into doing something about it. Like when they’re not breaking the law and shit. And when they see that they can push that far, they try to push a little further.
That’s, I suppose, a macrocosmic reading one could take away from The Stalker and perhaps Bomer intends that. As Doughty says:
[…] winning was not negotiable; he would win, he wouldn’t stop a conversation until he won it.
Doughty, for most of the story, finds ways to come out on top in the most infuriating fashion. And like a certain president, it helps that he lacks all shame and embarrassment. Losses get painted as wins, wins get painted as owning the dems or whatever the fuck.
I don’t want to stray too far into the political reading of the book or its specific comparisons to “the moment” because, like I said, it’s hack and easy and utterly boring and if you’re reading this you’re probably trying to escape from some dimension of reality into the joys of literary criticism. Feel my warm embrace!
The final aspect of the novel that I found rendered skillfully by Bomer was that, while it was frustrating to watch Doughty live his life without consequence, the rigorous way Bomer stuck to his POV pays off so well. We’re mostly stuck in this guy’s head. It’s a terrible place to be. It’s casually hateful and dismissive, usually of women and poor people4, but also of his “friends”. But Bomer always lays in hints that people find him genuinely unsettling to be around.
Doughty inherits money from his father when he passes. The estate lawyer tries to explain to him that the house is owned by the bank and all he will be getting is the meager sum in his father’s chequing account. Doughty essentially hears none of this. All he cares about is getting money. With this money, Doughty moves to New York, and nothing comes of the $250,000 he thinks he will inherit.
Later, when he tries to come into possession of Sophia’s apartment for various reasons that to explain would be to spoil, the lawyer he talks to is clearly disconcerted by Doughty. Probably because he’s seeking advice on how to squat his way into ownership of a SoHo loft, among other reasons.
Bomer never strays into the didactic, never has to paint it so black and white that this guy fucking sucks. We’re locked into his POV and it all seems like another day at the office for Doughty, which makes it all the more chilling because it’s full of crime and casual abuse and disdain for all things human.
I am definitely not the first to do so and make no claim to be, any further reading about this book inevitably brings them up.
I can’t stress enough how uncanny Michael Weston’s performance is in this episode, and how well written it is as well. There is quite literally no logic to the character in a way that can be parsed by someone acting rationally. David can’t talk his way out, can’t evoke pity. It’s an incredible achievement by the show and the actor.
Weirdly, once you start doing crack, it’s all you really want to do!
Despite Doughty being a homeless leech with no money.