truepenny | Review: Schutze, Bully (Reply)

Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge by Jim Schutze

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a better book than I thought it was going to be. It starts off slowly, partly because Schutze is trying to convey the aimlessness of the lives of his protagonists, white middle-class high school drop outs who work minimum wage jobs (if at all) and smoke a powerful amount of marijuana along with doing a variety of other drugs. Ironically, the only one who was even trying for anything better was the murder victim, Bobby Kent, and it's not clear how much of that was HIS motivation and how much was his father's pushing. These are kids whose parents don't know what to do with them and who don't know what to do with themselves. They have no aspirations, no work ethic, and the kind of amorality that tags along with entitlement. They feel they have the right to do whatever they want, and if that includes murder, well, then, so it does.

It's also clear that the murder victim is just as bad as any of the others. He's a bully, a homophobe, a rapist. He seems to enjoy his 'roid rage and go out of his way to find people to vent it on. He and his best friend/murderer had a habit of harassing mentally disabled people. And, yes, that best friend/murderer oxymoron: Marty Puccio was Bobby Kent's best friend, but he was also his favorite punching bag, and eventually in the love/hate balance, hate got a lot heavier than love.

But this isn't just the story of Marty and Bobby. It's Marty's girlfriend Lisa who decides Bobby has to die and does all the planning, roping in a ridiculous number of people: her cousin, her friend, her friend's friend, her friend's boyfriend, a self-styled "Mafia hit man." Lisa can't commit murder herself---she tries and fails---but that doesn't lessen one iota her determination to see Bobby Kent dead.

The first half of the book, the lead-up to the murder, would almost be funny if you didn't know someone was going to end up dead, because these people are as incompetent at murder as they are at everything else. The second half of the book, the aftermath of the murder, would be funny if it weren't so appalling. They all agree they won't tell anyone, and within two days, five of them have told at least one person. They work out an alibi, but Marty can't remember what it is when he's talking to the cops. Lisa---and her mother and uncle and cousins---believes she hasn't actually done anything wrong. SHE didn't murder Bobby Kent; she literally didn't touch him. And she cannot grasp that that literal sense of murder simply isn't what's on the table. (She and several of the others are also violently allergic to the word "murder," like it's somehow better if you just say you killed someone.) She cannot grasp that what she did was just as wrong as what Marty did. She doesn't seem to have a real good grip on the idea that what she did was wrong at all. And Marty, who is a kind of ambivalent figure in the first half of the book---he goes along with all of Bobby's sadistic schemes, but he's also victimized by him, and Lisa insists that he has a softer side, that it's Bobby who makes him mean---doesn't seem to care. His feeling seems to be that if what he did was wrong, that's really not his problem. The book ends, almost triumphantly, with Marty getting the death penalty (and seems to be unaware of how this complicates the question emblazoned on the dust jacket, DOES ANYONE DESERVE TO DIE?), and I must note anticlimactically that his sentence was later commuted to life.

This is one of those cases that make pundits wail about modern youth. As a reference point, Bobby Kent was murdered in 1993.

Four stars.

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