Why is it that I is the only pronoun we capitalize? “It’s because we believe that we are irreplaceable,” says Joseph Suglia. “We fetishize ourselves. We turn ourselves into gods.” Hence the premise of his latest novel, Watch Out, in which the main character, Jonathan Barrows–a vicious tyrant who’s self-obsessed to the point where the only thing he lusts after is himself–methodically and psychotically turns up his nose at the entire world.
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Littered with antiquated ten-dollar words–no colloquialisms for Suglia–Watch Out is meant to grate, to challenge your tolerance and notions of how to relate to a character. On one hand, you despise Jonathan Barrows for his oblivious conceitedness; on the other, you wonder if perhaps he truly is the hottest, smartest, most interesting stud in the universe. His obsession with his own “luscious erection” is repulsive yet engrossing–you end up feeling like a creep for getting so involved in his gruesome hallucinations.
Watch Out, which Suglia calls “philosophical pulp” fiction, is his third book and the only one he really likes. Two weeks after its October release by FLF Press, a small publishing house that proclaims itself dedicated to providing “ideas and viewpoints that are under-represented in the mass media,” it had sold 400 copies. Even before it came out, local filmmaker Peter Lambert made a feature-length movie, Becoming a Man, adapted from a chapter in which Jonathan Barrows loses his virginity. When talking about his first novel, Years of Rage–the inverse of Watch Out, its main character believes he’s universally reviled and persecuted–or his self-published book of literary criticism, Holderlin and Blanchot on Self-Sacrifice, Suglia winces, confessing that the first one panders and the second one is boring.
