SALON

Thursday, Nov 15, 2012 7:00 PM UTC

“The Devil in Silver”: The haunted madhouse

Author Victor LaValle brings the voice of Queens to this tale of a demon stalking a mental ward

By

Topics: Fiction, Audiobooks, Mental Illness, The Listener, The Devil in Silver, Victor LaValle,

Most novelists shouldn’t narrate the audio versions of their work. A professional actor can almost always do a better job, especially when the novel features a lot of dialogue and a variety of characters of different ages and genders. There are exceptions, of course — novelists renowned for their dramatic talents — but not many. With nonfiction, it’s another matter; the best works are already written in an artful approximation of the author’s own voice. Whether it’s Tom Bissell reading his thoughtful ruminations on the art of video games in “Extra Lives,” or Mitchell Zuckoff relating the true story of the World War II servicemen who accidentally provided a New Guinea tribe with their first encounter with the developed world in “Lost in Shangri-La,” the nonfiction author speaks directly to his reader, and hearing the book in his voice makes sense.

I recently found an exception to this (admittedly loose) rule in Victor LaValle’s novel, “The Devil in Silver.” I’d bounced off of LaValle’s two previous books, “The Ecstatic” and “The Big Machine,” a particularly frustrating experience, since his premises, and the ideas implicit in them, are so intriguing. To my internal ear, unfortunately, his style seemed to jangle awkwardly in the gap between slangy vernacular and a more conventional narrative formality, and I’d given up after a chapter or two.

LaValle’s reading voice, however, seamlessly knits together the dual influences of street and branch library. It’s the sound of Queens, albeit a soft rasping version of that swaggeringly percussive, gloriously American accent. Queens, as LaValle explains in “The Devil in Silver,” is the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the world. It’s relatively poor as well, and the wards of New Hyde hospital, a public mental institution and the setting of “The Devil in Silver,” offer just about the level of care you’d expect in a beleaguered urban institution.

The novel’s main character, Pepper, ends up in New Hyde via an improbable series of events, compounded by his own short temper. He’s not mentally ill, and most of his fellow patients are surprisingly compos mentis themselves, which is just as well, given that, by night, their ward is stalked by a demonic, homicidal, buffalo-headed creature. “The Devil in Silver” is part modern madhouse narrative (a genre that includes “Girl, Interrupted” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), part horror story, and if you’re not asking yourself “Is it real, or are they just crazy?” (because the characters are all at least a little bit crazy), the challenge of figuring out where to draw the line between the delusional and the actual is still a big part of the novel’s allure.

Ken Kesey’s famous novel comes in for a bit of criticism here — one of the characters complains that “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is more about the discontents of the counterculture than the lives of “people like us,” society’s discards. For LaValle, New Hyde is emblematic not of the intolerance and authoritarianism of mainstream American culture, but of the fate of the underclass abandoned to the dwindling mercies of a decrepit welfare state. The beast that hunts them might as well be capitalism itself, heartless and ravenous. But they’ve still got some fight in them, and some hope, and that’s why LaValle’s own voice, tough and soulful, feels just right in speaking for them all.

*   *   *

New to Audible? Listen to “The Devil in Silver” for free, or check out a sample.

Continue Reading Close
Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations