Textbook Trash Human | Paula Bomer’s The Stalker
Reviews
By Mila Jaroniec
Some novels offer a slow descent into darkness. Paula Bomer’s The Stalker (Soho Press, 2025) doesn’t bother. From page 1, we’re lodged inside the consciousness of Robert Doughten Savile, or “Doughty,” a man (boy? manboy?) so thoroughly devoid of empathy that following his thoughts becomes an endurance exercise in queasy fascination.
I’ll be honest: I hated this book at first. But it doesn’t mean much to me when I feel that way. A strong emotional reaction to some deep-seated prejudice is an invitation to dig deeper, to discover something more about the work and myself. Sometimes it’s the quality of the writing that elicits the hatred (along the lines of, How the hell did this get published?). But no, the writing was solid. Singular voice, tight sentences, vivid, stripped-down imagery—nothing wrong there. What was wrong, then? Obviously, I knew better than to hate the book on account of the narrator.
But that was it. I hated him. I hated how flat and conceptual Doughty’s character seemed, how purely, irredeemably awful, more like an idea of a person than a person, and how for some reason that was unacceptable in fiction, something I might flag in a student’s work. I wasn’t looking for redeeming qualities, but I was looking for nuance. Complexity. Layers! Surely, I thought, this cadence can’t be sustained for the length of a novel. People like this exist, of course, but can they narratively hold water? If this is meant to be literary fiction, can the protagonist really show us something different being this one-note?
But: a moment after I thought all this, it occurred to me that far from being the flaw of this character study, this was, in fact, its genius.
We always look for the why and the how. We can’t help it. We want to know what’s under there, to “get into the mind of a monster,” as it were. It’s why true crime exists. We’re curious. Sickly captivated. But, as case studies and deep dives into the minds of American psychos continually show, more often than not, there’s not that much there. Evil is largely pedestrian. There’s no grand design—it’s just that, in some people, a switch that should be turned on is turned off.
Doughty isn’t meant to be layered or nuanced. He is, quite literally, a textbook trash human. But here’s what spotlights Bomer’s skill as an artist, the degree to which she’s mastered nuance: even with all of that front-loaded, with two hundred-plus pages of grounds for defenestration, he still manages to pull empathy. By the end of the book, I was, against all reason, feeling sorrow for him.
Not sorry, but sorrow.
Deceptively, the book starts off as if it were about just another indulged and indulgent White boy in upper-middle-class America. But it takes only a couple pages to see this one is something different. From the jump, he zeroes in on Beata, a waitress at a diner in a crappier town close to his hometown of Darien, Connecticut. He and his friends go there for shits and giggles, mostly to feel superior, and he decides he’s going to seduce her and he does, and humiliates her for fun. He goes to college, drops out, and decides it’s time to go seek his fortune in New York City—the fortune being lying about having a high-powered job in real estate and charging for blow jobs in Grand Central Station toilets and splitting his time between his storage space and two women’s apartments, plus a homeless junkie’s tent in Tompkins Square Park (it’s easy to forget the novel is set in the ’90s, until stumbling upon references to landlines and tent city and partying at C-Squat). His friends from high school, who’ve also moved to New York, are distancing themselves; Beata, who has also moved to New York and whom Doughty accidentally runs into at the bar she works at, agrees to spending time with him largely out of fear (not that we get other characters’ perspectives, but we can intuit their feelings—it’s impossible not to). Teenager to adult, from the first page to the last, our protagonist—or main antagonist—evolves within his delusions to a tragic and dangerous degree.
Beyond a domineering father and a meek, alcoholic mother, there’s no secret trauma hiding behind his choices, no monsters under the bed. If anything, there’s been encouragement—“Every woman loves a fascist,” his father, his role model, would say. People are expendable, interchangeable units, his father taught him, crops to be planted, harvested, replaced. We know this view; it’s familiar. Doughty is all the rotten parts of capitalism and White supremacy personified, all of them knit together. Everyone knows a privileged, entitled person who’s problematic—a little racist, a little sexist, completely self-involved—but Doughty is all of them, all at once. And like he often says, “It’s just too much.”
Doughty believes he’s exceptional. Not in the way most people believe they’re special, but in an ultra-delusional, almost metaphysical sense. He clings to the conviction that he comes from a superior bloodline, a kind of hyper-aristocracy. He doesn’t identify as a person among persons. That self-perceived otherness becomes justification for his increasingly disturbing behavior as he builds a distorted ideology from fragments of masculinity—his father’s iron-fisted ethos, George Carlin, Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. These men form his personal pantheon, a trinity of imagined mentors who, once he’s gained their knowledge, he wouldn’t hesitate to dispose of in a heartbeat.
The women in his life are, to put it mildly, subhuman. They’re not people, they’re functions. Sophia, an alcoholic editor and trust fund kid whose Soho loft he worms his way into by essentially showing up and not leaving (they hook up, he sleeps over, and they date for fourteen months) eventually dies right beside him from alcohol-induced acute pancreatitis. Doughty doesn’t notice. When she becomes sick, vomiting and weak 24/7, he dismisses her as lazy and dramatic, ignores her when she asks to go to the hospital. It takes him three days to realize she’s dead, and that’s only because her friend shows up. He called the friend and asked her to come over because Sophia wouldn’t get out of bed.
Admittedly, I was bracing myself for some type of necrophilia. But what kind of lunatic doesn’t register a corpse?
But he does get his comeuppance. Unlike so many monstrous men in life and literature who hurt women and get away with it, karma does have its way with him. After he rapes Beata and then has the effrontery to show up at her bar, he gets driven out to DUMBO by her friend turned bodyguard (who lures him into the van with the promise of crack, to which Doughty is now addicted) and gets the shit beaten out of him. Violently. Folded in half and forced to suck his own dick, crack pipe shoved down his throat—that kind of revenge. It’s fine, he deserves it. But the real sad thing is, even during all this, Doughty still has no grasp on what’s happening. He appraises his own humanity with the same alien detachment as everyone else’s. While satisfying in its way, this final retribution is, at the core, an empty gesture. We want him to suffer, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t feel anything, not even physically. He just accepts, adapts, becomes the stone. That’s the twist, and the tragedy: this is someone who doesn’t feel anything for other humans because he doesn’t feel human himself.
Bomer never pulls the camera back, offers no explanations, no psychological analyses to soften the horror of a mind like this at close range. Few meaningful references to childhood appear throughout the novel, a notable avoidance of the trauma-plot cliché. But there’s something uniquely unsettling about spending time with a character like Doughty—not because his actions are deranged, but because of his eerily mundane, insidious perspective. He’s all there, and there’s an internal logic to all this. He’s a ticker tape of White Western patriarchy dialed up to extremes.
The difficulty in accepting The Stalker’s pathological, self-absorbed yet self-alienated central viewpoint as valid and complex is not a failure of craft—on the contrary. Paula Bomer is, clearly, a master of hers. The difficulty in accepting it lies in the fact that we don’t want to believe it’s real.
Mila Jaroniec is the author of two novels, including Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover (Split Lip Press). Her work has appeared in Playgirl, Playboy, Joyland, Ninth Letter, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, PANK, Hobart, The Millions, NYLON and Teen Vogue, among others. She earned her MFA from The New School and teaches writing at Catapult.
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