The Stalker — Dinaburg Writes

by Paula Bomer

Somewhere, a monkey’s paw curled down. I have spent years wishing for less nuance and more, “This is bad and you should not empathize with this person” clarity within media that spotlights bad people doing bad things. Less than a month ago I reiterated my point that morally objectionable acts becomes washed and the characters that choose them are redeemed simply by virtue of being our window into their world, by being charismatic or charming.

And lo, unto me was delivered The Stalker. This, now, is a tale of realizing that what you want is not actually what you want. I think perhaps I should have wished for POV characters to…do…fewer heinous acts. Because Doughty, the guy we have to follow around in The Stalker, is not a good dude. Ever. Not a single time. There is no twist or revelation that we should be rooting for him to break free from the hardships life has thrust upon him. Nor is there anything but malice beneath the surface of posturing wealth, rotting teeth, and mechanical intellect. I am not a person that believes in a state-sanctioned death penalty, but I actively wanted this character to die as a harm-reduction measure before the end of the book. There was literally nothing good about Doughty; it is never to anyone else’s benefit to have met or interacted with him in the slightest. We see in his head, so it isn’t misinterpretation or misunderstanding. I don’t know how I, as a human, feel about recognizing that I have within myself the ability to cast a life-and-death judgment on the representation of another human and without hesitation opt for death. It doesn’t square with my world-view, or my self-view, though I suppose if in reality I could also see someone’s true thoughts and it was simply a black void of destruction without even the hint of redemptive potential…well, luckily, I can always assume people in the real world will get better. The Stalker makes it clear Doughty never would.

Kudos, then, to The Stalker for doing exactly what I thought I wanted. Now let us never think about it again.

“What are you doing here?”
“I came to surprise you!” he said. “You look like you could use a drink. I know a bar around here that you’ll love. It’s not Lucy’s, but it’s got a similar vibe.” He had no idea about any of the bars, but he also knew that he would find one. It was NYC.

I think, perhaps, what is most affecting about the book is that taken out of context, some of the things Doughty does are kind of…standard. Like, this lie, that he knows a cool bar when he doesn’t have a clue, is a simple deceit that, when dating, is taken as a cute bluff, designed to impress. But with Doughty we see his intention is to manipulate, we know his intention is to exploit–he’s isolating a weakened antelope, preparing to consume it. “Consume” lacks the ick factor: Doughty subsumes his victims, more like an amoeba. I don’t want to use a wild animal analogy because as far as I can tell, animals aren’t intentionally cruel in this way. That’s the hook; The Stalker is not a prurient glance into the life of a creep, it’s an extrapolation of the worst fears women have while dating. Just lies the whole way down, the possibility that the person you are opening your life up to is someone that wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.

This book was a little fiction bump for me while slowly continuing my way through C.L.R. James’ Beyond a Boundary, a 1963 work about the sport of Cricket. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that both books had the same unique last name–Lipsyte–on the cover. Some fast googling showed me that Robert Lipsyte, who wrote the introduction to Beyond, is an acclaimed sports columnist, while his son Sam Lipsyte, who blurbed The Stalker, is an essayist.

An odd coincidence for one person reading both books at once, but a nice foundational meet-cute if two people happened to cross paths—each carrying a book with a cross-generational familial blurb on the cover–in a story far less heinous than The Stalker. Would Doughty notice a detail like that, and use it as an in? Honestly, who gives a flip what Doughty would do; that dude is dead and gone. Hallelujah.