Bad Guy

by Rosalyn Drexler

Dr. Mathilda Brody, an unconventional therapist, discovers the forces which led fifteen-year-old Jesus Allendez to kill an elderly neighbor during a burglary

180 pages, Paperback

First published June 3, 1985

About the author

Rosalyn Drexler, a painter, playwright, and novelist, has been on the scene in several arts for many years. She is well known in Soho art galleries, infamous off-Broadway, and highly regarded as a fiction writer.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the risk of being a GR scab and reviewing while the mass uproar continues to roar, massively, let me slip in a little word or two about this marvellous novel by Rosalyn D—a standout favourite so far (copies still available used—check the Devil’s Dealership!) in her out-of-print oeuvre. Bad Guy is narrated by Mathilda Brody, a therapist who takes teenage rapist and murder Jesús into her home to cure him of his childhood trauma. A mixture of warped psychology and dark satire, this novel is a typically manic and exuberant Drexler production, taking pot-shots at the underbelly of American culture and its restoratives, with unexpectedly (but short-lived) sombre moments. Drexler establishes herself as a satirical voice and novelist on a par with her (then) contemporaries—Barthelme, Vonnegut et al—with this one, at least in my mind. Shame she only sparsely authored after. A perfect intro to her skittish fiction.

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Drexler on the psycho-analytical tropes of 1980-or-so, via a teen killer taken in by the middle-aged psychiatrist hoping to understand him (or secure more funding). It's rapid and entertaining like most Drexler, but the actual theories regurgitated onto the page here don't go much deeper than a surface gloss that even the narrator who brings them to us seems somewhat unconvinced by. And the terminal plot twists, though harsh, seem tragically inevitable rather than actually shocking. Decent later Drexler, but not, for my money, her best.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark, funny and unsettling - just how much of a satire is it? Is everything proposed and done by the therapist to be mocked? And what about Jesus himself, to what extent are we witnessing any authentic responses from him?

A strangely uncomfortable book in a way, like standing on shaky, moving ground...

This is a hard trick to pull off, and hard to make such a novel still feel "satisfying", but Drexler succeeds.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What effect do you think television has on the adolescent male? Do you think that watching TV can hypnotize the watcher and act in the same way as a drug?"

This is a fairly simple book on the face of it. Mathilda Brody, a therapist, has one of her patients, Jesus Allendez – a convicted murderer and rapist – come to live at her house as a more immersive form of therapy. The book appears to be concerned with the interaction of television of the youthful psyche – there is a memorable discussion around the murder itself where Mathilda posits that when Jesus found himself with the gun in his hand he had no choice but to shoot (hi Chekhov!) as hundreds of hours of television had conditioned him to that one moment, of pulling the trigger.

So, that’s the surface level.

Really this book seems to be more a satirical send-up of therapy, and therapists, and psychological theory in general. Because, here’s the thing, Mathilda is a terrible therapist. I don’t mean that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about – she understands theory just fine – I mean that she consistently makes utterly horrible decisions, not only for her patients, but in her own life as well. She is also an almost complete sociopath – she seems completely unable to shut off her detached-therapist-voice (the book is in first person from her perspective) even in her personal dealings, so there is almost continual blunted affect in her narration. Added to that, there are great concerns around her reliability as a narrator, mostly surrounding her completely inability to recognize the previously referenced horrible decisions that she constantly makes, mostly due to a narcissistic clouding of her image of herself.

All in all it makes for an interesting – darkly funny – little read.