Self-Portrait of Someone Else (novel excerpt)

Booklist:
“...one would swear the main character, Tim Buckles, truly existed, were it not for the author's skillful employment of literary devices that announce this is a work of fiction. The result is a dramatically suspenseful yarn, imaginatively told....”

New York Times Sunday Book Review:
Vincent Eaton's dark, angry and intense first novel uses police documents, psychological evaluations, interviews, straight narration and interior monologues to chronicle the self-destruction of Tim Buckles. At 28, Buckles appears at first to be leading a normal life. He has a steady job as a lifeguard, a bungalow in Los Angeles and a loving girlfriend named Alisa. The problem is, he feels as if he's living someone else's life. When Alisa becomes pregnant, she encourages him to take a job in her father's business. Tim's feelings of alienation escalate. A drowning and then a disastrous visit to his elderly parents, who have become more miserable with the years, push Tim over the edge. In sparse prose, Mr. Eaton leads us through a series of violent events, many of which take place inside Tim's mind. In the most powerful sections of the book, Tim pretends he is a healthy and productive individual, telling everyone exactly what they want to hear. At the same time, both Tim and the reader realize that he is descending into madness. Mr. Eaton is not subtle. He immerses us in Freudian nightmares and is not afraid to twist psychoanalytic cliches into graphically detailed scenes, such as the lurid one in which a son takes the ultimate revenge on an unloving father. In ''Self-Portrait of Someone Else,'' Mr. Eaton concocts a puzzle out of a depraved childhood, a retarded twin brother, multiple murder mysteries, flashbacks, hallucinations, a love story and self-analysis. The pieces all come together in a brave literary debut about an intelligent man who, struggling to understand and control his rage at his past, ''realizes himself away.''