A precocious eighteen year old schoolboy, Asher narrates the principal
events of his life: sex drugs, family, school.... Not a user himself, he
manipulates the school's drugs pusher into handing over control of his
operation, then turns him in to the police. A frightening psychopathic
detachment permeates all of Asher's behavior. From his mother, who is
merely one of a series of convenient sex objects, to his close friend,
everyone is expendable.
Asher reserves his deepest contempt for the world of grownups, a world,
to his mind, ruined by sentimental notions of society, family, love. He
battles internally with the memory of his father, around whose death
hangs a terrible secret guilt. The attempt to dominate, indeed, to
banish any intrusion into his internal world, is mirrored externally in
the remorseless control of his peers and those women who unwittingly
become his lovers.
This precisely structured, economical novel does not flinch from the
exaggerated and unpleasant world of Asher's mind. But the reader is
moved from love-hate, or straightforward loathing, of this arrogant
young man to feelings of profound compassion for someone lonely whose
fantasy life isn't easily distinguished from reality. Asher's poise
finally collapses when he falls in love with an American college girl
whom he admires unreservedly and who is as smart as Asher. She has the
capacity to play his own game back at him, recognizing that he is not
merely sociopathic but really quite funny. The culture in which Asher
lives is the nineties, approaching millennium: selfish, anguished,
superficial, confused about morality and evoking nastiness and despair.
Asher is its mirror.
