A compassionate mystery of madness

Anthony James, narrator of Victor LaValle’s intriguing first novel, “The Ecstatic,” is a mess. Massively overweight, flunking out of Cornell, mentally unstable, suffering bouts of dementia, wearing nothing but shattered glasses, his hair “a giant cauliflower-shaped afro,” Anthony is unable to care for himself in his off-campus apartment. Seeing three archangels on his stoop one day, he cries upon realizing that his mother, sister and grandmother have come to take him home to Queens. “Why don’t you go put on clothes,” Nabisase, his 13-year-old sister, suggests.

What follows is an incisive, if at times madcap, portrait of mental illness as seen through Anthony’s eyes. He doesn’t know what abnormality has claimed him, nor do his family members, but they’ve all had experience dealing with similar oddness. “I sure wasn’t the first one in my bloodline to go zipper-lidded,” Anthony explains. His mother had previously suffered from an unnamed mental illness, though when the story opens, Anthony tells us, she’s now “sane and slim.” Uncle Isaac, too, had been afflicted -- until he committed suicide. “So when they discovered me in that Ithaca apartment Mom and Grandma recognized the situation. Their boy had become a narwhal.” On the ride home to Queens, his 93-year-old grandmother turns to Anthony: “We will be fixing you.”

Anthony’s family members try to help him, each in her own way, though they feel blame, responsibility and anger. Their affectionate methods of restoration are sometimes questionable. His mother, for instance, tries to cure him with dietary adjustments, as if, Anthony comments, “lentils were a natural antipsychotic.” His sister urges church. Ultimately, these caring women do not hold a cure beyond love, and that isn’t enough to fix him.

Fortunately, Anthony’s experiences are not written in the bittersweet way such subjects are usually handled. “The Ecstatic,” rather, is gritty and funny, both smart-alecky and dark. The book’s poignancy packs a punch because the heartstrings are tugged so infrequently, as when Anthony’s teen sister, who’s often the one caring for him and their mother, says that if she could ask God one question, she would want to know “why he made some of the people in my family get so sick.”

Most of the scenes are highly comic but are never insulting. Anthony dresses his 315-pound bulk in cheap purple or green suits to go to his jobs cleaning houses and asbestos-contaminated commercial locations. (Picture Ignatius J. Reilly, the unforgettable character from John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” as a Northerner.)

Anthony makes friends with Ledric who, like Anthony, wishes to lose weight but whose methods involve inducing a tapeworm. Anthony’s sister participates in beauty pageants, including the Miss Innocence contest (open only to girls who have preserved their chastity) and one pageant in which the winning ticket is not beauty but the ability to claim a heartbreaking history of strife and hardship. Nabisase, with her grandmother slung over her back, fabricates a tale of being orphaned with only her ailing grandmother left as kin; she wins the contest.

There’s the neighborhood loan shark who convinces Anthony to write a movie script for a horror film. And a pack of wild dogs terrorizes the community. We realize, as the story unfolds, that Anthony’s mother may not be quite as sane as initially thought.

For that matter, no one in this narrative may be quite sane. The world Anthony inhabits is utterly surreal, leaving the reader to decide if certain elements are figments of Anthony’s fevered brain or simply the lunacy of contemporary urban life. Or, perhaps, a combination of the two.

In the context of Anthony’s eccentric community, his mental illness is not very out-of-step. With great subtlety, author LaValle urges readers to see the madness that constitutes much of life as we know it, even the idiosyncrasies of cities themselves. “I had been to Baltimore once, that bipolar city,” Anthony tells us. “On one block was the moderately regal Penn Station, then four blocks over a quadrant of desiccated row houses. The neighborhoods went like mood swings, good to bad, horrendous to opulent, without warning.”

To his credit, LaValle, whose 1999 short-story collection, “Slapboxing with Jesus,” won critical acclaim, doesn’t make fun of Anthony’s predicaments, though with all the laughs, there’s plenty of opportunity to do so. Rather, he brings to the writing a huge dose of compassion. “Was there a way I spoke or looked that made people think they needed to carry me with tongs?” Anthony wonders, as any of us might on an off day. “I’d thought I hid my confused state expertly.”

Inscribed with a generosity of spirit, LaValle’s brazen, off-center tale transcends stereotypes to uncover the real calamity at the story’s heart: The confusion that marks the human condition is not limited to those afflicted with mental illness.

*

The Ecstatic

A Novel

Victor LaValle

Crown: 278 pages, $22.95