Asher

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.