Are there subjects authors of serious literary fiction should avoid? What can a writer learn or express by writing about the elements of society we feel are most perverse?

I gave a presentation last night on one of the most disturbing novels I've ever read: The End of Alice, by Amy Michael Homes.

The reader quickly gives the unnamed narrator a name: pedophile. Soon after, we give him another name: psychopath.

Because we see the narrative through his eyes, this narrator resembles Humbert Humbert from Nabakov's Lolita; because of his elitist, classicist use of language, he resembles Hannibal Lecter, made infamous by the film Silence of the Lambs. On this surface level, the novel feels like a writer's case study of the criminal mind.

In Lolita, Humbert Humbert makes us squirm because Nabakov asks us to read (and therefore, identify with) the story through the eyes of the pedophile himself.

In the film Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter isn't a source of terror simply because of the atrocities he's committed, but because of the heightened clarity of his intellect. He isn't just a face-eater. He is also a genius.

In The End of Alice by A. M. Homes, the criminal isn't the only one on trial. The novel begins by creating a complicated framed scenario: the narrator, incarcerated for many years, tells us he is often sought out by many people--aficionados, haters, historians, museums. One woman's correspondence, however, grabs his attention. He tells us that he'll translate a certain series of correspondences he's having with the 19 year-old woman, a sophomore in college, who has developed a taste for young boys.

Several literary tricks complicate the reader's experience. First, because we're hearing everything through the frame of the narrator's perspective, we're forced to see instances of vivid, yet surreal, atrocity inflicted upon the narrator, where he no longer looks like a predator. Second, the entire novel is framed such that time has no meaning, time converges, everything seems to happen at the same time, so the reader is asked to experience terror of- and pity for the narrator during a single moment. Third, because the narrator fits the profile of a psychopath, we are sorely tempted to write off every attempt he makes to talk sense.

That was the most disturbing part. He may very well be crazy. He may very well be sick. But the rest of us who have not been diagnosed with craziness or with sicko-ness must be careful with our judgments. This book makes us question all the boundaries we create between Us and Them, between Right and Wrong, between Predator and Victim, and even between Real and Imaginary.

What is more repulsive: the "pervert's" thoughts, locked up as he or she is inside the walls of prison; or the person who reads the newspaper every day, watches the evening news every day, watches movies and reads books about violence after violence every day and remains unaffected?

Who is more deserving of critique: the person who has been affected by the real horrors of the world, or the person who becomes so numb that to him, the world news seems unreal, distant? Is it more perverse to be affected or unaffected?

Who is wise or innocent enough to know which is worse?

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