If I'm remembering it right, the essence is that a woman goes to a funeral of someone she doesn't know, where she meets the man of her dreams. The two really hit it off, but the guy leaves before she can get contact information from him. She does her best to track him down, but to no avail. In the end, she winds up murdering the guy's cousin. Now if you're a psychopath, you supposedly understand why she did this.
I have to add, I could be retelling this morbid tale wrong, so maybe you've guessed the answer because of that, and you're not a psychopath (let's hope... and by the way, stop sharpening that stick).
The point is that the woman fully expected the guy to show up at the cousin's funeral, giving her another opportunity to meet him. And if you find that chilling, you have some idea of the effect Ronson's book has. Like other reviewers on here, I more or less scooped it into my brain in one sitting -- it's that good. It's easy to see the embryonic structure of a movie adaptation, in the same way that his previous book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, became a George Clooney vehicle.
Ronson recounts the story -- which is bound to be the core of any film -- of how naive shrinks at the Oak Ridge facility in Ontario decided the best way to treat psychopaths was to give them LSD and use "naked therapy!" For real. It's astonishing how anyone could imagine this would be a good idea, and if you're expecting disaster... Well, I won't spoil it for you. Why should you sleep any better than me? There is a thread of a narrative about an enigmatic young man named Tony who has spent the better part of his life in Britain's infamous Broadmoor institution, with his cause being championed by the Scientologists. The trouble is that Tony might be a psychopath. And Ronson goes to visit a being of genuine evil, Toto Constant, whose atrocities in Haiti most likely had the backing of the CIA.
Even Canada's Karla Homolka makes an appearance. For those not familiar with the story, Homolka plea-bargained her way to a lesser sentence in the 1990s after she helped Paul Bernardo rape, torture and kill two teenage girls while videotaping it all. Ronson retells an anecdote in which Homolka allegedly needed to be brought back to the scene of the gruesomeness and casually asked one of the police officers about a bottle of perfume she had left behind.
As an aside, I have to admit that the Bernardo and Homolka case is one of the few that interest me. I picked up Ronson's book because of my curiosity over the science. What makes psychopaths, if anything? Or are they born that way? How do they function in our world? We're fed a regular diet of nihilistic, soul-crushing brutality in the form of Criminal Minds, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior and the nastier episodes of CSI. As much as people keep telling me Dexter is a good show, and from what I've seen it is, I can't bring myself to watch a program where a serial killer is presented as a sympathetic protagonist.
So I have to admit I've always been fascinated by the weird twist of fate that Paul Bernardo could find a "soul mate," a woman who didn't run shrieking over the suggestion of, "Hey, honey, why don't you use veterinary drugs so that I can date-rape your sister as my Christmas present?" Which they did. And the drugs killed her. And they almost got away with it. What are the chances of two beings lacking in moral restraints finding each other?
But as Ronson suggests, psychopaths may be more common than we think. Just as a recent study implied that nasty, mean people actually do better and rise to the top at the office, if you're a psychopath, this may actually work in your favor. And it may explain why our world is so fucked up. It's a compelling theory. But you won't get much sleep either if you accept it.
This is a breezy book with a conversational style, and Ronson has taken a unique and highly effective approach. If he had written this with the detachment of regular narrative non-fiction, it would still be a great read, but he has included himself as one of the central characters and a flawed one at that, a man who's decent enough but who supposedly irritates his family and friends with his neuroticisms (which you have to suspect he exaggerates). By telling his little stories this way, he reassures us that he's sane, and so likely are you. We share his horror at some of the truly batshit, scary things recounted.
In a very mild way, the book also offers an indictment of the psychiatric field and the drug business -- though not in the shrill manner of Scientologists who have declared all-out war on them. No, Ronson's concern is our own. The nagging doubt that the shrinks really don't know what the hell they're talking about, and when they do close in on an empirical method, it's one that boomerangs back with disastrous results and has allowed a pharmaceutical industry to cash on the self-diagnosing, self-medicating masses. Ronson quotes Bob Hare, the guru who came up with the test to identify truly frightening people: "Just wait and see what happens when they develop a drug for psychopathy..."
In the same way that active toddlers who prove annoying suddenly become diagnosed with ADD, so every pharmaceutical drug for psychopaths will needs thousands of customers to make it cost-effective. Surprise! We have now discovered there are many more out there than we think. Hmmm... What do you figure? Do you want a high-functioning psychopath in a corporate boardroom, running on just his cup of joe in the morning? Or do you want a psychopath experiencing side effects, in the same way that some teenagers have committed suicide after taking the wrong anti-depressants?
Then again, what are the chances that psychopaths, who apparently know how to rise to the top, don't succeed as well at Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson?
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