In a strangely wholesome way, the reader begins to root for Marvin's madman. We want Cohen to straighten up, heal his soul and start anew. I walk in sewage live in garbage grab souls live behind stained walls should have been aborted before birth,'' he says. It drops us into the reality of a madman on speed, without making it either sexy or purely abject. It shows, in Cohen, madness as pain, as emotional numbness rooted in childhood torment.
Scene follows scene until one realizes that all of the scenes are rendered more or less uniformly.
Cohen wonders about an old girlfriend, takes a shower and then kidnaps, strips and murders two college girls in the desert. No event is more significant than any other. To someone who cannot feel, all of life is a passing parade of visual images. Cohen's is the awareness of someone constantly watching TV, where shampoo makes your hair shine longer and bombers waste a factory in Sudan. Cohen is a self-actualized loser, America's shadow.