“Lowboy gave Bones his village idiot smile, puckering his lips and blinking, and solemnly held up his middle finger.” So goes a moment emblematic of the character at the heart of Wray’s (Canaan’s Tongue) new novel. William Heller, a.k.a. Lowboy, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and he sets off on the one-day journey that comprises the book’s action, by sending the final farewell through the closed doors of a New York subway train, waving to his mental-institution handlers.

He’s escaped on a mission: save the world from its end by fire, which he’s convinced will occur the following day if he doesn’t lose his virginity and release the anti-global-warming cooling force within him. Wray starts with a satirically outsize set of conditions to move toward more earnest stuff, as what follows is a mostly masterful fictional study of human relationships in the shadow of insanity.

Chapters dedicated to Lowboy in his mostly underground travels alternate with those dedicated to his principal pursuers: his mother, Violet Heller, and missing-persons detective Ali Lateef. As detective and mother roam the city in search of Lowboy, the detective’s constant questioning of the mother leads us to a cliff hanger sort of revelation. Without giving anything away, let’s just say the mother’s been, by her own admissions, withholding something from the detective that is pertinent to her son’s case. That something, though key to understanding the book’s totality, feels like a trick coming so late.

Rest assured, though, that they won’t catch Lowboy, whose quest will be fulfilled by a prostitute uptown. Still, that won’t put a damper on his fears. In Lowboy’s fragilely constructed, all-fantasies-realised universe, every chapter ends with a bang, and the final one is no exception.

Todd Dills

Published by FSG