Beyond a Reasonable Trout

By Margaret Hicks in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 3, 2007 3:38PM

For last month’s Convince Us, we asked you for the worst book you have ever read. We chose Paris Trout by Pete Dexter.

We were worried that we were going to have slog through another “young, black girl in the south” coming-of-age story. Another The Color Purple without the quality writing. Paris Trout begins with poor Rosie Sayers, a 14-year-old black girl with a mean momma, a lonely heart and a streak of bad luck. We hunkered down for a treatise on how difficult life was and how Rosie perseveres to become a strong, old woman with wounds and scars that made her the woman she is today.

But the book surprised us when Rosie is brutally murdered by the title character, and the man we end up with is one of the most foul, complicated and shudder-inducing madmen we’ve seen since we watched The Stepfather.

Paris Trout is a local shopkeeper and underground banker to the local “colored people.” Even though Paris is an upstanding part of the community, many are leery of his quiet manner, the secret life inside his head, and the fact that “Paris Trout knows directions you never imagined were there.”

Trout is one of the most repellent characters we’ve met in a long time. After the murder, Paris becomes increasingly more paranoid; he stinks of urine, has tantrums when no one’s looking, screams and yells in rooms where only he resides, but manages to pull himself together long enough to rape his wife with a water bottle. Hanna Trout, Paris’ wife, finds “him sitting at his desk, pointing a heavy-looking square pistol a the ceiling. There was no one else in the room. Slowly he brought the muzzle of the gun down until it rested, together with his one open eye, in the middle of her chest. He was unshaved, and there was dried food in the corner of his mouth. The other eye opened, blood red.”

Paris Trout is a thoroughly unlikable character, and Dexter makes no apology for it. Trout’s descent into insanity has no sense of melodrama to it, it‘s subtle and scary with a tip-of-the-iceberg feel to it. We realize we‘ll never know what’s really going on in Trout‘s head and we can let our imaginations fill in the disturbing details.

We realize one man’s trash is another man’s Trout, but we were pleasantly and horrifyingly surprised by this tale of a truly deranged individual. We can't wait to see the movie.