At first I
wondered whether it’s because I’m a writer perpetually in search of characters
that the most recent type to catch my fancy seems to pop up everywhere? It’s the
psychopath, a personality no longer limited to drooling serial sex murderer incarnations.
In this age, psychopaths, who comprise a surprisingly high percentage of
corporate employees, have come to seem so nearly normal that they even have
their own media spokesperson.
I refer, of course, to the handsome actor in a
brawn suit who stars in a series of commercials for organic hot dogs. I can’t
even remember the brand of hot dogs, but whenever the actor appears, assuring
the conscientious mom-type opposite him that his hot dogs are safe for her kids
to eat, my attention is glued to the screen.
Is he all natural?
mom-type asks. He is, he assures her, flexing his obviously plastic pecs, his
mesmerizing, unblinking eyes fixed on hers.
But isn’t he chock full of growth hormones, mom-type persists. After all, isn’t that a needle
stuck in his, uh, haunch? Without even a glance at the supposed needle
(mercifully not visible to the television audience), he wills mom-type to gaze
deeply into his soulfully soulless eyes. “That’s not mine,” he says.
All the while, I’m
mentally checking off the points on the PCL-R (psychopath checklist, revised)
as formulated by Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare. (Glibness and
superficial charm, cunning and manipulation, pathological lying, failure to
accept responsibility for own actions, etc. Numbers 1, 4, 5 and 15 on the
PCL-R. Yes, yes, yes!)
But tempting though
it is to run through the list, with weighted responses for each its 20
categories, in an attempt to diagnose public figures, acquaintances, even
ourselves (which Dr. Hare strongly advises against), this blog is about
literature, not criminal psychology.
Even if we’re not
willing to give our characters full points on every item of the PCL-R (criminal
versatility or failure to meet conditions of probation, for instance) dribbling
in even a few can sharpen the focus either of a story’s antagonist, or more
surprisingly, its main character.
On that last
point, I’ll give a public thank you to mystery writer Mark Pryor, who I met at
this year’s Writers’ League of Texas conference in Austin, Texas. By day, Pryor,
an English ex-pat, is an assistant district attorney. His alternate job,
however, is writing, both the Hugo Marston series and the stand alone Hollow Man whose scarily charming main character
is also an English ex-patriate assistant district attorney in Texas.
Pryor denies any
other points of resemblance between himself and his character, a psychopath who
describes in detail how hard he tries to repress his nature and fit in with
what he terms the “empath” world. Not because he likes those empaths, but
because it’s easier to con them if they think you’re one of them.
Even while I
admired the character, I wondered how a psychopath could possibly fit into any
literature except that of crime and suspense. Surely a more literary genre
wouldn’t have a place for psychopaths. Then I found Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld’s recent retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Jasper Wick,
Sittenfeld’s glib, lying, manipulative, parasitic, sexually-promiscuous,
impulsive and irresponsible (items 1, 4, 5, 9, 11, 14 and 15 on the PCL-R)
villain.
Wick in
many ways resembles his original Austenian alter-ego, George Wickham, who
briefly fascinated Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. Now I’m keeping an eye
open for psychopaths in and out of literature, and merrily ramping up the
psychopathology quotient of the villain in my own work in progress. If
psychopaths were good enough for Jane Austen, how can the rest of us resist
them?
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