The Diary of a Rapist

by Evan S. Connell

Book Overview

The story begins with the unhappy marriage of junior clerk Earl Summerfield to the much older Bianca. Feeling victimized by his cold wife and mocking superiors at work, Earl decides to keep a diary, a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0880014083
• ISBN13: 9780880014083
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Not your 50 shades of grey

This book delivers exactly what the title says. The lead character is a reprehensible human that enjoys stalking and then raping women he sees on the street. Most of the book is dialogue between him and his therapist; the therapist tries very hard to hide her distain and revulsion for her client. The book is interesting only if you find exploring the criminal mind. Otherwise, don't go near it.

Not that great

Honestly, this really is tame. If you think you will have to worry about trigger warnings, I guarantee you will doze off.

Don't let the title scare you off.

"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.

Deeply unsettling, utterly compelling

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.

Deeply Disturbing

This is the diary of a rapist. It is also an exploration of the degenerating thought patterns of this man's mind. The first thing one notices about this work is the lack of abject sexuality...there are no long erotic dream sequences, no detailed review of violent acts, no endless explorations into kinky sex. Our main character (I refuse to use the term "anti-hero") thinks of himself as a witty bon vivant who SHOULD have the power to mesmerize a certain woman. You discover midway that at some point he abused this woman and is now taunting her. Then he begins to unravel and slowly descends into madness that we view through his increasingly obscure diary entries. Fascinating read.