‘LITERARY CRUELTY’

I write to take exception to some of John Rechy’s remarks in his review of “Boys of Life” by Paul Russell (Oct. 6). He speaks of a “growing school of literary cruelty” whose members include Dennis Cooper and Bret Easton Ellis, as well as Russell.

Rechy castigates these writers for focusing “so intimately on a violent protagonist that they seem to want to become him. There is nothing redemptive nor admonitory . . . The result of this psychological slumming is a disturbing ambiguity of intent. Without illumination, these novels seem to justify the barbarities described.”

As far as Ellis’ “American Psycho” is concerned, the narrative point of view is strictly first-person, arguably the most difficult form to successfully achieve. If done well, first-person narrative absorbs the reader wholly into the protagonist’s mind.

Rechy would seem to want first-person villains to be remorseful and have second thoughts about their actions, and so provide a narrative line that contrasts with (and presumably thereby tempers) their initial “barbarities,” or at the very least have them brought to justice. It also strikes me that by changing the word “violent” to “immoral,” Rechy’s criticism could have applied equally well 70 years ago as a criticism of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

The problem I have with Rechy’s premise is that it implies that I can’t be trusted, as the reader, to draw any conclusions that aren’t enumerated by the narrator . . .

The “disturbing ambiguity of intent,” and the “illumination” as well, play out in the field of my imagination as I read and reflect. The ambiguity is something I have to wrestle with, and the illumination that does arise comes out of that struggle.

To think that the reader is incapable of wrestling with such ambiguity is either to take a cookbook approach to fiction (what I read, I will think and do, regardless of my own interests or thoughts), or to presume that the reader is immature and can’t be trusted to distinguish his own reflections from those of the character.

PAUL B. TURPIN, LOS ANGELES