The Diary of a Rapist: A Novel

"The Diary of a Rapist" is a middle-class "Taxi Driver." It is a modern "Crime and Punishment." Connell has written one of the best novels I've ever read about fear, frustration and isolation. The main character, Earl Summerfield, is stuck in a loveless marriage, unhappy with his job, afraid of almost everything, and completely frustrated with how his life has played out. Earl alternates between self-love and self-loathing as he faces the ultimate fear: the possibility of a life wasted. As the days go on, Earl obsesses about the violence surrounding him, the drudgery and squabbling at his office, the hate he feels from his wife, the constant abuses he feels he suffers. Typically, Earl thinks he could have been so much more. If it wasn't for his wife, his supervisor, his whoever, he'd be a great man, a wealthy man. The frustration cracks him, and he latches onto a beauty queen he thinks represents what he considers the modern trampy female (Earl's incompetence with women leads to a deep misogyny). After the act the title of the book suggests takes place, Earl can't help but romanticize the woman. Thinking that he loves her, that he needs to marry her, that she enjoyed what happened. I don't think I've ever read a novel that better understood loneliness. How internalizing the rage of your inadequacies can lead to delusions and acts of impulsive violence. Connell gives you a front-row seat to Earl's pitiful life -- his lack of will, his fantasies, his inability to function, his almost bipolar shifting attitudes, and how he eventually takes this out on someone else and hurts her -- and it is scary and it is sad. The only other character study that so accurately reveals the dark conscience of the Broken American Male is Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." But Connell's book is even better, because he puts you right in Earl's mind, and it is a place both fascinating and disturbing.

Earl Summerfield, 26, feckless junior clerk at the State Unemployment Bureau, miserably married to the loveless Bianca, 33, keeps a diary for one year. It becomes a record of marital hatred, the paranoia and pathetic rivalries of office life, and, increasingly, a record of violent crime - the rapes, robberies, senseless murders and gas chamber executions reported in the daily news. Earl's apparent disgust and dismay at the crime wave alternates with violent sexual fantasies of his own. Fleeing Bianca and his apartment some nights, he begins sneaking into other people's houses. When he becomes fixated with the local beauty queen, Mara St Johns, it's only a matter of time before Earl's fantasies become reality. Or do they?... I imagine many readers flee from this novel - even from the title - assuming it's some kind of exploitative or voyeuristic pornography. Far from it. It is relentlessly voyeuristic, but the object of that gaze is Earl's mind. This is a tremendously engaging novel of psychological realism, and what gives it that vivid quality is that Earl is as inconsistent as any real person. He loves himself, he's filled with self-loathing. He deserves to be promoted, he's an idiot for dreaming of it. One day he despises work, the next he can't wait to go in. One night he revels in personal insights and dreams of self-transformation, making life-changing decisions which are instantly reversed or forgotten by the next. He's a man unravelling; caught in the trap of middle-class existence which fuels his dreams without giving him any real hope of achieving them; caught, too, between desire and the Puritan legacy for which the circuit breaker is a violent rejection and punishment of sex. What's most compelling about Earl's diary is that the more deranged, anti-social and evangelical he becomes, the more consistent are his writing and behaviour. In the end, he lives up to his rhetoric.

"The diary of a rapist" is a dangerous title. I thought anyone bold enough to use that title would write an intriguing book, so I jumped on board at the thought of exploring a new genre. I wanted to be intrigued, and possibly read something that put me outside of my comfort zone. While I agree with others that the narrative is a portrayal of psychological disruption, for me the author doesn't jump deep enough in the water. While I feel the book is well written, it just didn't work for me. If it wasn't such a quick read, I would have abandoned it half way through, as I found my mind wandering off continually. Overall, I felt it was a little too safe, nothing of significance came to pass, and it ultimately failed to live up to its catchy title.

This novel is so absorbing and raw. Reading it is like scratching a mosquito bite: you know you should stop, but can't. The author nimbly takes you into Earl's plunge into private shell, and explains how a sex offender's head gears turn.

It's a good book I wish more people will read it.

Stunningly ugly. Art, at times, is better than science at the purposes of science in explaining human behavior.

This is a convincing depiction of a delusional psychopath. It is also a puzzle for the reader -- just how much of what the diarist records occurs beyond the interior boundaries of his mind. It would be a difficult work to create without special psychiatric insight, but one thing that distinguishes artists, especially writers, from the rest of us is the ability to understand or imagine the perspective of others, even to a highly detailed degree. Connell succeeds in doing so. My one criticism is that the diarist's repeated mood swings between pathetic self abasement and grandiose illusions become, well, repetitive. A point came when I thought "OK, enough, I get it." But I'm glad I stuck with it to the haunting ending. Connell does an impressive job of creating Earl Summerfield.

Evan S. Connell's The Diary Of A Rapist fails as a novel for two large reasons. First, is the technical reason that its usage of small diary entries limits the point of view of his narrator, the rapist Earl Summerfield, which necessitates his not portraying fully his own predicament because the character simply cannot. By contrast, in Connell's two masterpieces of prose, Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, the short sections, written in an omniscient mode, allowed a brushstroke technique that slowly built indelible portraits in poetic touches. But, even were the tale to have been told in a more conventional manner, or in the same style that Connell sketched the Bridges, the work would still fail because Connell is unable to fundamentally grasp the mind of a criminal, or the concept of evil, instead relying on the worst narrative clichés imaginable....In short, The Diary Of A Rapist is merely a poor imitation of a true exploration of human evil, and, coming from a writer as talented as Connell, a profound disappointment, yet, oddly emblemic of his up and down, hit and miss, career. The basic conceit of the book fails because the references to himself as Earl Summerfield, as well as the many incidents offstage, are too self-consciously detailed and unlike any real diary. The whole novel reeks of artifice, lacking even the accidental poesy a real diary might have, in its relentless and focused drive toward violent hermeticism. There is a fatal schism between evil as it really is and how Connell projects it in the book, especially toward the end, when Connell begins his inevitable and trite `descent' to madness and death, that ultimately dooms the book as a viable work of art, much less a genuine and believable portrait of evil. Thus, when on September 6th, Summerfield writes, `The more I'm stripped the more I feel pain,' it reads not like Summerfield's own cliché-ridden diary entry, but Connell's novel's cliché-ridden prose. That's his, and the book's, greatest crime.

A fascinating and rather horrible novel, written from within the mind and soul of a self-justifiying stalker and assailant, who drifts into ever-deeper confusion in the course of a chaotic year.Beautifully structured, this portrait of a schizophrenic attacker as his mind collapses, and his domestic life falls apart too, makes a very uncomfortable read - not unlike Patricia Highsmith at her best.

Unconvincing and dull. Compared to the sublime Mr and Mrs Bridge this is frankly very thin stuff. Missed a trick somewhere, by not having the courage to press on into the dark.